@AndreS
That’s great thanks very much AndreS!

@Cottmain
Is it pci pass through for an M2 wireless driver?
Perhaps Firewall is say Opnsense and it had say pci pass through then if OPNsense (FreeBSD ) supports those drivers and the card in hostap mode that can be done

@AndreS Hi - thank you for your reply and your examples of computers you use.
I want to experiment with different setups safely and without hassle, and one where backup restore points are easily.
Ideally I will have

• a firewall allowing access through different network card ports. (My understanding is that a ‘bare metal hypervisor’ gives greater safety when virtualising a firewall).
• an obligatory windows VM
• space enough to run different linux distributions (experiment with setting up Zerotier and things like that).
• an Intel cpu that facilitates AV1 encoding of video
  (I’m thinking there won’t be drivers for Intel wifi but I could run a wifi router with different SSIDs on different subnets being diverted to different VPN locations by the firewall according to their source IP)
  … all in one home pc

I’m a hobby linux user and used to work in a support job … I hope you will forgive my lack of knowledge

I’d like to build a small home pc for XCP-ng to learn on and virtualise home firewall and other setup. It seems that not having ECC ram or a server may not be insurmountable as I’ve read about people setting up Intel NUCs and Intel cpu based Apple Mac Mini.

I’m hoping to have a smoother installation with less headaches but still have a relatively low cost machine

How would this work:

Network Card (http://hcl.xenserver.org/networkadapters/358/Intel_Ethernet_Server_Adapter_I350_T4)
INTEL Ethernet Server Adapter I350-T4
With SR-IOV

Intel CPU
Cpu and bios virtualisation capabilities (VT-x, VT-d)

GPU
(hoping to avoid the costly items in xen HCL)
AMD (thinking AMD drivers in linux kernel and hopefully can use workarounds to get PCI pass through as per Tom on YouTube)
(Possibly AMD 8gb RDNA2 )

Motherboard
Bios settings for VT-x, VT-d
try to get onboard Intel Nic

Q: Am I heading in the right direction?
Q: Should I avoid 12th gen CPU and DDR5 at this stage as they may be too new to get working (expensive too)
Q: As it’s a server based design I’m guessing there is no chance onboard intel M2 wireless will work ?

Thank you