gswitz
M$
But that program works only with the Enterprise version of Windows 10 and requires a certified Windows To Go drive.
Interesting. I didn't know about that program. Here is more detail on it:
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/deployment/planning/windows-to-go-overview I don't see any indication that Microsoft is imposing a big royalty on it. It does appear that the drive supplier has to add some firmware features that allow Microsoft to protect their property. It must not be a very popular feature (Enterprise only) because it was announced 5 years ago, yet there are only a few compatible thumb drives out there.
The requirement for the Pro level of OS probably makes this a non-starter. So I am back to the idea of using Hyper-V as a way to lock up a stable platform for the long term. I can't find anybody who has actually done this. The following thread has a bunch of people saying "Ohhh noes, you can't do that", but later in the thread there is a detailed comment from a person who seems to know a lot about Hyper-V. His assessment is it is possible with caveats.
Six years ago, I ran a commercial environment where we had 3 large servers running a dozen virtual machines, and some of those VMs were very performance-critical, real-time systems doing hundreds of transactions per second. VM technology (both in the software and in the Intel platform support) is really quite impressive and works in many cases that people don't expect it to.