Most of those options come down to what you want from them. TrueNAS, Openmediavault, and Unraid are storage options with the ability to run VMs or Containers. Hypervisors (ESXI, Proxmox, etc) run VMs and containers, but are not really designed for storage. It gets a bit muddy since there is a lot of overlap. You could run TrueNAS as a VM on a hypervisor.

I keep things separate. My storage runs bare metal storage OS (UnRaid and another TrueNAS). My server handles all the heavy services and Internet facing services. For a homelab, go nuts. Try an all-in-one server. If you have equipment, try multiple things. I’ve ran all different storage on my server to see what I liked best. Just make sure to have routine backups no matter what options you choose. Nothing is worse than a major failure and losing it all.

Not sure if this was resolved or not, but did you check for static IPs on devices? I ran into an issue when setting up the SG108E where even though I had Linux set to DHCP, it was assigning the manual entry. Rookie mistake 😞. Once I cleared the manual entries and cleared the static IPs from DHCP leases it cleared.

Yes!! I have many switches! I see this is a Cisco, so you will learn how to run a managed network using Cisco CL. Making that work with the TPLink will be fun and educational. Pretty nice!