My environment is a (freshly installed) Debian server with ZFS pools. I would like to store files in ZFS and share them using Samba.

My question is which is better from efficiency, effort, and security (for the host) perspectives? Running it natively on the bare-metal Debian host, running it in an LXC container, or running it in a VM? Why do you think one way is better than the others? I'm pretty familiar with VMs, but don't have much experience or knowledge of containers.

This is what I'm thinking at the moment, but I would appreciate any feedback:

1. Natively: no resource overhead, medium admin overhead (manual Samba configuration), least secure(?)
2. LXC: small resource overhead, least admin overhead (preconfigured containers and/or reproducible configs), possibly more security than native(?)
3. VM: most resource overhead, most admin overhead (not only manual configuration, but also managing virtual disk [including snapshots, backups, etc]), most secure