I'm planning an upgrade to my homelab with a Proliant DL360 G9 with 256GB SSD for ESXI and 4*4TB HDD in raid 10.

It will be used for Nextcloud, Immich, media management, adguard and many, many more apps under Docker in Linux VM. Maybe NVR in the future.

So with this setup I would have two datastores: The one SSD with ESXI and a logical 8TB drive.

I have this idea: Create a Windows server VM and create a this folder structure for example:
share -> nextcloud_data

-> Immich_data

-> media

-> friends_backup etc... you get the idea...
and mount this shared folder in the Linux VM.

Is this a good setup? How much space from each datastore should I assign?(Install VM to SSD and add D drive with maybe 7TB?) What about a throughput between the VMs and shares? How to easily and securely manage access?

Bonus question: A friend will have identical setup. We would want to backup the most important files to each others servers. What VPN do you use to setup a connection between two servers? Or setup VPN on router?. as for the backup part I thought about using Veeam.