I just use NixOS as a VM and run services as containers directly. Self-plug: I wrote a tool that makes it easy to run Docker Compose projects on NixOS [1].
This way, I get the advantages of NixOS config, while also being able to run arbitrary applications that might not be available on nixpkgs.
As far as storage goes, I just use ZFS on the hypervisor (Proxmox) and expose that over NFS locally.
This way, I get the advantages of NixOS config, while also being able to run arbitrary applications that might not be available on nixpkgs.
As far as storage goes, I just use ZFS on the hypervisor (Proxmox) and expose that over NFS locally.
[1] https://github.com/aksiksi/compose2nix