Well after much trepidation, and some additional work, I think we are complete.
After the successful virtualisation of my Home Assistant and Music Server hosts, and a successful POC of the main Vera / MQTT / MSR / everything else box I did some testing with a spare UZB stick to make sure I could connect it to the virtual host.
With a long weekend ahead to solve any issues, this morning I bit the bullet and shut down the hardware device, moved the production UZB stick over to the NAS and spun up the VM.
It was not entirely smooth as for some reason Z-way-server was saying it wasn't connected and AltUI claimed an authentication issue, but with some judicious restarts and testing, everything that I can think of to test now works!
Some of the Z-wave commands from remote controls are a little slow, oddly, but I suspect the network needs to sort itself out as it's nearly two months 'old' Direct control from web interfaces / voice commands seems fine so I'm not overly worried.
So, barring any unforseen failures, I have a fully virtualised system. Better even, when reading about the Synology range, I decided to source an older unit as a backup cluster device so I have some serious resilience 🙂
Thanks for all the support an input!
C