My work has licenses I can apply for VMs when I’m keeping them for longer client work, so yes they are licensed in my case.

I wouldn’t do that for my own personal use though.

I have given up dual-booting and just have a Windows VM for work things that require Windows. Less muss, less fuss and I can move the VM around as needed when moving between primary PCs.

Yes, I’m a technical person, but not a web developer and so this was all new to me until very recently. Good luck!

The way I think of the cloudflare tunnel is very similar to a VPN into your system from outside, but for web application traffic specifically.

Not the guy, but I use a domain I bought from cloudflare with a cloudflare tunnel on my network. Not as secure as a VPN like tailscale, but doesn’t require setting up a VPN for my friends and family’s TVs so they can connect to the server while keeping my actual IP hidden and without needing to do any port forwarding.