{Geek}

As anybody here knows, I'm primarily a Mac guy, although I worked at Novell in the 1990s, ending my Windows experience with NT4.0. Now, after twenty years of being self-employed, I've gone to work for a small trucking company. My primary duties are as the Accounting Controller / Manager; however, I have found myself in the role of IT guy more and more in the last year.

Over the last year, we had some legacy hardware. Large, powerful, 2U HP rack mounts running Xeon processors. They were running server 2008R2 and 2012 in VMWare containers. There was a dedicated 12,000 BTU window A/C dedicated to keeping them cool. Nothing! But! Trouble! Overheating, shutting down, etc. After the regular IT guy was no longer being used, this mess became mine to deal with. They were only being used as a file share anymore anyways. All other services, like email and Office 365, have been moved to hosted services.

I promptly went out and purchased a Synology DS1019+ and a DS218+, filled them with WD Red drives (CMR, not SMR), and migrated all the volumes over. The DS1019+ is our main machine, and the DS218+ resides offsite. I use Hyperbackup and Snapshot Replication to keep everything backed up and to keep the DS218+ synced so it can immediately serve as a production machine, if it were needed. Both devices are formatted with btrfs filesystems and hybrid RAID volumes, single disk redundancy. As a side note, Hyperbackup was easy to get running. Snapshot Replication required a little more effort. It needed a ddns server, and fixed IP addresses on both the remote and local location, and a couple of port mappings. Otherwise, it was easy peasy. I also run hyper backups to two external disks that I swap weekly, so there is always an air-gapped backup no more than a week old. FWIW, these Synology diskstations blow away the old servers. Easy to administer, easy to backup, almost no power usage, and fast, as a simple file server. Bravo Synology!

On to Microsoft. I have spent decades,===DECADES===, hating this company. However, I'm going to give credit where credit it due. Windows 10, boy how you have grown up! To everybody who is hanging onto Windows 7, why?? Hyper-V alone is reason all by itself to upgrade at least to 8.1. Microsoft basically allows you to run an unregistered copy of Win 10 in Hyper-V, with only a little nag on the wallpaper. Windows in a container runs about the same speed as it does natively. This allows me to keep multiple Quickbooks files open simultaneously, greatly easing inter-company transfers. The setup was easy. Bravo Microsoft!! The ability to run a virtual OS is so great that I'm thinking of doing everything in multiple virtual machines full-time. Kiss my ass, crypto-locking bastards. Although I find Win 10 to be a dated GUI compared to MacOS (whatdaya mean I can't rename an open file?), the ability to virtualize Windows blows away the inability of the MacOS to be >easily/legally< virtualized. Apple bastards! I'm not giving up my Macs, but I sure wish I could emulate the MacOS without screen sharing a spare Macbook Pro.

In summary, I'd just like to say, good job Synology and good job Microsoft. You're making my life easier at the moment.

Any other hidden gems, like Hyper-V, that I should know about lurking around inside Windows?

{/Geek}

Are you aware of Windows 10x?

New for 2020, and probably won't be released until 2021, you can use your Windows 10 Pro to run it in an emulator -- also from Microsoft -- all free!

Here's how.