Dran

I run clusters of both LSI-based hwraid and zfs at work. I strongly recommend zfs over hwraid. The long and short of it is hwraid hasn’t kept up with software solutions, and software solutions are often both more performant and more resilient (at the cost of CPU/memory).

For homelab scale, zfs is definitely the way to go, especially for archive data.

Wendel wrote up a pretty good guide for those looking to understand what makes zfs so good if you want to dive deeper. https://forum.level1techs.com/t/zfs-guide-for-starters-and-advanced-users-concepts-pool-config-tuning-troubleshooting/196035

Intune is kinda point-and-clickey for sure, but would you not consider puppet and ansible IaC? What would you classify it if not?

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/mem/configmgr/core/understand/introduction

Configuration Manager / intune / sccm / whatever they change the name to next is the first-party solution from MS. It has always been able to modify an existing install. Push out a fresh piece of software, reconfigure one, uninstall one, force a group to update a gpo or update windows, etc…

Most universities use intune/puppet/chef for this in labs and for deployed desktops/laptops to faculty/staff to keep things up to date and consistent.

The tool sets you’re looking for fall under a category called IaC (infrastructure as code). They allow you to define environments and add installers and configuration to those environments. Typically they require an extra network-accessable server to act as a controller for the toolset.

My personal go-to at work for exactly what you’re asking is Puppet.

Other popular options: Sccm, Chef, Ansible