Maybe a dumb question, and doubtless a little off-topic, but why would someone want to run a ZoneDirector rather than Unleashed? Is there any benefit to it in a home setting? Or is this something that would only be beneficial in a much larger environment?
I think most people don't even need Unleashed - if you're running a single Ruckus AP then the standalone firmware is completely adequate. Sure, it's ugly to setup, but I bet 99% of people don't touch their WiFi setup again once the initial config is done.
I think a ZoneDirector is good if you want to have a complicated VLAN config, or tunnel some AP traffic back to a central point, or do various other HomeLab style fun.
It's great if you're buying used APs for your home. You can buy whatever's cheap and hook it into one system.
I run R600s, H510s and R650s at the moment, and they're all running the latest ZoneDirector release with WPA3. This is not possible with Unleashed.
And before that I was running ZF7982s, R700s, R600s and R610s together.
Mainly though it's much easier to hack a ZoneDirector 1200, so that's what I've been doing.
Unleashed is a real pain to mod - you need to
unpack and repack squashfs images, and generate the magic headers for them. And when something goes wrong (which it does A LOT when you're trying hacky stuff out) you have a dead AP which needs rescuing over the serial pins.
With the ZD1200 I can do most of the testing by just remounting / as rw; and the couple of times I bricked it were no stress - I just popped the cf card out and re-imaged it on my PC.
There is not much difference between the ZoneDirector and Unleashed system. E.g. all of the apps and scripts are the same for both. So anything interesting (e.g. non-random DPSK passwords, and VLANs per DPSK) can usually be retargeted to Unleashed once I've figured out how to script it.
And because ZoneDirector 1200's software is x86, and was designed to run fine on their developer's PCs, my assumption is that I'll have no roadblocks virtualizing a ZD from their installation images (which I won't feel guilty about once they stop selling them at the end of the month).