Indeed. I hate to see people discourage its use. It's brittle and a pain, but it does provide some really nice benefits that you don't easily get with other tech.

I'm sure you'll be fine. Give it a go, post if things seem confusing. I think Hyper-V networking can be confusing, whereas VMWare just gets things working. I have VB...

C'mon, Lynn. You're a senior guy. dig into the logs. Should be something in /log/errorlog that helps you.

Replication is not going away, at least not in anything I've heard. Some may want it to, but there is work being done to improve it. I think little changed...

It's simple. If you have W10, I'd just install a .\SQL2017 instance and get it working.

You might also try the container route. You can keep SQL 2016 and...

It's really easy. Don't let ignorance create fear. Virtual Box is a Windows app, next, next, next. Create a VM, pick a folder/file to hold it. My Ubuntu VM was...

If you want SSMS in a container, look at turbo.net. I've used that with SSMS in a container, but not sure that would work on Linux. The underlying architecture of...

Hopefully. Our salespeople use it all the time. I just wish I could see the web servers on it.

Shouldn't matter overall for the instance. The db engine should be separate. What's shared is typically the connection libraries, the tools, the other stuff.

One thing you might aim...

Good to hear. I think we stil have some optimization routines in the .NET side, as the database seems to be working fine:

http://monitor.red-gate.com/overviews/cluster/254914-ntclus.lon.intensive.int/sql/ins1

You need to do this for one instance (please use instance, not server). Determine how to query those items. The CMS will send this query to multiple instances.

If...