One option for a home lab/server/NAS is to use a Mac Mini oder Studio with external Thunderbolt gear like the OWC Thunderbay Flex 8 and a Thunderbolt 10GbE SFP+ adapter. Every solution has advantages and disadvantages, of course, and with a Mac, especially a Mac Mini, there are obviously advantages in terms of ecosystem, computing power & power consumption, but you often read that macOS is simply not meant for server operation.
One of the relevant issues is the creation of LUNs as iSCSI targets. I would need this, because I’d also want to use my server for production work, not just for file storage, media-related things (like Plex) and other services (e.g. Vaultwarden). For the latter three, macOS plus Docker or native installations is probably a fine solution, provided you’re using proper Thunderbolt devices.
For high-bandwidth fast-access production work, however, my client Mac would need to connect via iSCSI for local mounting, and you can do that with third-party initiators on macOS, even if the best/fastest option will cost you a decent amount of money.
But can you create a LUN on macOS? On turnkey solutions like a Synology NAS it’s a simple process via DSM’s SAN Manager. On Linux you have tgt or scsi-target-utils to create targets, but those are not available via macOS package managers, so I assume that either they haven’t been ported, or macOS is simply not suited.
Is there any solution for macOS, a solution that is stable, e.g. after reboots?