You’re not crazy, your instinct is sound. The issue is that the retiring admin is reasoning at the VM layer without thinking about what’s underneath it.

The real question isn’t “one NAS vs. many virtual drives” it’s: what is Proxmox actually running on, and how is that storage managed? Right now you have file shares living inside VMs, but those VMs still live on physical disks somewhere. What’s protecting those? If the answer is “not much,” then the redundancy argument he’s making at the VM level has a much bigger hole underneath it.

His concern about a NAS being a single point of failure is legitimate in principle, but it applies equally to whatever physical hosts those VMs are running on today. The difference is that a proper storage platform gives you tools to actually manage that risk—RAID, redundant controllers, hot spares, snapshot-based backups—in one place, rather than hoping nothing goes wrong across a bunch of independently managed drives.

For a small company on Proxmox, a reasonable path forward would look something like: a NAS or storage appliance with redundant controllers and proper RAID (TrueNAS or a Synology RS-series are common choices at this scale), presented to your hypervisor via iSCSI, with your VMs and file shares running on top of that. That’s not exotic—it’s just doing storage properly. In a larger or better-resourced environment you’d look at redundant SANs with dedicated FC or iSCSI fabric, but that’s probably not the right fight for a small shop.

Longer term, consolidating file shares onto a dedicated file server with DFS (Distributed File System) is worth bringing up, it decouples your file shares from your domain controllers, which solves the reboot problem you already identified, and gives you namespace flexibility as things grow.

You’re asking the right questions. The fact that you’re thinking about this before you’re fully in the seat is a good sign.