Don't know if this is the right category, someone please correct me.

This is a topic that i've been thinking about for years, trying to get at it from different angles. But imagine you have a NAS, in my case an Asustor Lockerstor 6 (Gen 3), which handles iSCSI in a very intuitive way (drag/drop LUNs on Targets).
Now, i've tried to migrate one of my retro pc's which holds WinXp, Win7 and Win10 to boot from iSCSI instead of having a multitude of SSDs, and i have a whole box filled with different iSCSI NICs to account for this. But it never just works. It's either too complicated, or it fails on the finish line thanks to some driver, oprom or firmware. It's likely all the planets in the solar system has to line up perfectly before i manage to boot any of these operating systems from an iSCSI LUN.

So something I've thought would be the ultimate solution to all these problems, is something like a small SBC with 10G NIC that runs an iSCSI initiator and presents that incoming LUN to an eSATA port.
This would enable anyone to run anything from SATA to IDE from iSCSI, which would include snapshots on the server side. In other words, you could run your Win98 intallation on actual period correct hardware like you run your emulated console games, with save states. And you wouldn't even have to mess around with macrium reflect.

I know someone managed to do exactly this on a raspberry pi, but instead of eSATA, presenting it as a USB drive. But that's not the holy grail I'm looking for.
https://github.com/jwmullally/openwrt-rpi4-is … i-to-usb-bridge

Thoughts?