Accepted Solutions
Hi Brandon and welcome to the community!
Best practice for files shares is going to highly contentious within Admins 
Either option you have suggested is fine and really comes down to what solution you have the most skills to manage. If the team is more familiar with Windows shares, then a Windows VM might be the better option.
Other things to consider or throw into your decision making process are:
1. HA - you mention having two Dell R510 for the NAS. This would cover you for hardware failures if you choose to go this route otherwise you could cover the Windows VM with HA in the even of a hardware failure in the VMware environment.
2. Hardware migration - if you virtualise the file server then it’s a simple migration to move hardware.
3. Backups - being in the same environment may simplify your backup solution as one could cover all workloads.
4. Visability - by having the server virtualised you can see all your workloads in the one place.
5. Growth - virtual gives you the ability to scale CPU, memory and disk.
6. DR - with virtualised you could have a single DR solution to failover all the workloads. Of course a lot of people use things like DFS-R to provide high availability and always on for file shares so this might not be a big deal.
7. Maintenance/power/space - virtualised gives you less tin that requires patching, powering and storing.
Sure there are other considerations beyond the above but hopefully that gets you started. I know the list appears to be heavily orientated towards the benefits of virtualisation but it’s just meant to be thinsg to consider and see if you have covered.
Sorry it’s not a definite “do this” or “do that” but you know your environment best. Make the call based on what you know and how you manage the environment. VMware would definitely have you going the virtualised route but I still see a place where physical boxes make sense and once you have virtualised 99.9% of your tin, having one or two extra physical boxes is not onerous to manage
Kind regards.
Hi Brandon and welcome to the community!
Best practice for files shares is going to highly contentious within Admins
Either option you have suggested is fine and really comes down to what solution you have the most skills to manage. If the team is more familiar with Windows shares, then a Windows VM might be the better option.
Other things to consider or throw into your decision making process are:
1. HA - you mention having two Dell R510 for the NAS. This would cover you for hardware failures if you choose to go this route otherwise you could cover the Windows VM with HA in the even of a hardware failure in the VMware environment.
2. Hardware migration - if you virtualise the file server then it’s a simple migration to move hardware.
3. Backups - being in the same environment may simplify your backup solution as one could cover all workloads.
4. Visability - by having the server virtualised you can see all your workloads in the one place.
5. Growth - virtual gives you the ability to scale CPU, memory and disk.
6. DR - with virtualised you could have a single DR solution to failover all the workloads. Of course a lot of people use things like DFS-R to provide high availability and always on for file shares so this might not be a big deal.
7. Maintenance/power/space - virtualised gives you less tin that requires patching, powering and storing.
Sure there are other considerations beyond the above but hopefully that gets you started. I know the list appears to be heavily orientated towards the benefits of virtualisation but it’s just meant to be thinsg to consider and see if you have covered.
Sorry it’s not a definite “do this” or “do that” but you know your environment best. Make the call based on what you know and how you manage the environment. VMware would definitely have you going the virtualised route but I still see a place where physical boxes make sense and once you have virtualised 99.9% of your tin, having one or two extra physical boxes is not onerous to manage
Kind regards.