I’ve run mine as a VM for several years now. I haven’t noticed any appreciable impact on performance vs bare metal. I am able to max out my 1000/40 WAN.

That being said, the platform you use to virtualize it on will have an impact. I am running mine on a 3 node proxmox cluster with 10gig networking and SSD backed Ceph storage, so my benchmarks for performance grossly outweigh what my WAN bandwidth can accommodate.

Audiobookshelf is what your wanting then. It does exactly that, and even has a mobile client.