I decided that it was time to upgrade to Scale. Maybe deploy immich in the future. 1.5 days later after fighting the VM migration… I have the VMs running w/o crashing the OS (which turned out to be NIC overloading).
For my VMs to be part of the LAN, I had to create a bridge, and move DHCP off of eno1 onto my bridge.
For my OS to stop “crashing” I had to configure/disable CPU offloading packet work onto the NIC.
thanks to Gemini/GPT we landed at this init script:
ethtool -K eno1 gso off gro off tso off
Maybe other hardware is more robust but I had to do this to resolve my system repeatedly going unresponsive (triggered by high network IO for idrive backups). Now it runs, albeit w/ higher CPU load due to lack of offloading.