Been busy over xmas moving this website and my testbeds to a better server! Lots can be done in 2 weeks on an on-off basis.
WHY?
New year, new plans: New website coming soon, with a surprise release of something I've been working on hard for the last 12 months.
Need more capacity, and found a better deal (8 TB of raw storage, 4 pCores and 32 GB RAM for half the price of 160 GB/2vCPU/4 GB RAM!).
Formerly, the site has been running on a 2019 VPS and I've moved this to a dedicated platform running Hyper-V Server. It has been painful, I'll follow up with a post on what trouble this has been, but I've managed to get somewhere with the networking and storage, it shall be useful information for anyone wondering why Hyper-V networking simply doesn't work out of the box and how are you supposed to manage the disks, especially when the system is not domain joined :O.
Thus far however, I'm now able to spin up VM's of any OS, bind them to the vSwitch and they will have their own internal IP and gateway access to the internet, also - inbound NAT traversal is configured, and you see this webpage now due to that!
Quite surprised with how secure the Hyper-V platform can be too. When we use the KVM console to close down the host management ports and RD, plus enable the firewall, nothing can get through other than the NAT bridge traffic!
Cheers!