I worked somewhere where we had an unusual setup on having some IT being dealt with in house, and some being dealt with by an outside IT company with a lot over overlap…

One day the most senior tech from outside firm came to us as I needed to discuss quite a lot of important issues face to face… When he saw one of those hubs, his eyes light up and was almost begging me if he could have that as he wanted to use it for Wireshark.

Was strange as he was a very serious IT pro but happy with an ancient hub for this, while I would instead get small 8 port Cisco managed switches with port mirroring for this purpose.

One way could be to use imaging tools such as Acronis.

Make a bootable .iso and and extra .vhd for a second HDD

Boot into the .iso and make your image on the second drive.

Then disconnect the .iso and boot your VM normally.

Then once VM has booted, set up SMB share for the second HDD, then use that to copy the image from the VM second HDD to the actual VM host.

Then make a bootable Acronis .iso, copy the image from hyper v host to the bootable Acronis USB, and you will have achieved you goal.

But need an acronis license, or some equivalent and similar software.

I remember when I was young and poor (now just older and poor)… I would read about SCSI drives and always dreamed if I could have and use them.

But by the time I actually ended up having some machines with SCSI drives around 2010 I was incredibly disappointed.

I know you are planning to use your NAS for storage.

But I doubt I would be happy using Gbe for VM’s. Is this the point to plunge into 10Gbe?

Or other direction could be having storage local actually on the Optiplex but USFF/SFF very limited capacity to hold drives… If going that direction could transplant the Optiplex into a server chassis, but that would add costs.