The assessments are here
The software landscape is vast. It is a little like being in a candy store the size of a Walmart. With hypervisors like Proxmox and TrueNAS it is rediculously easy to sping up virtual machines or launch software with docker. What used to take hours installing an OS and configuring a physical resource only takes minutes. Installing software used to be its own hurdle. Getting it to work on you specific combination of hardware and OS could literally take days.
The tools That I use, or have used
Hypervisors
For the most part these tools are bare metal installs. Let's not get into the crazy case where a hypervisor is installed on a hypervisor. Yes it can be done but I personally think that it is crazy.
Proxmox
TrueNAS
Hyper-V
VMWare
Stay away, far, far away and it is still too close. They were the Gold Standard and about the only virtualization tool on the block. A decade or so, ago VMWare treated noncommercial users pretty well. It was possible to download the product and get a limited use key. You can still get freeware copies of VMWare Workstation Pro and VMWare Player for free, but these ae really intended for an individual developer's desktop rather than a server application.
VirtualBox
This was the first virtualization product that I used. It runs on a number of architectures as an application. It was developed by Sun Computer Systems and moved to Oracle when Sun was acquired.
It is a nice tool for testing on your desktop.
