Vagrant VS oVirt

You can give Vagrant a go (https://www.vagrantup.com). It is pretty handy for spinning up/down development VMs without even leaving your IDE.

Vagrant is a popular tool for launching virtual machines on your local desktop. https://www.vagrantup.com/

And, for the record, if you ever need to do something cross falls down on and Docker isn't suited to (eg. some of my sites are on a shared webhost that uses FreeBSD), the simplest way I've found is to use Vagrant with a script like this to run inside Vagrant to copy the project in, trigger a build, and then copy the binary out.

Have a look at vagrant to spin up VMs quickly, then use 'em to do stuff like configure a salt environment - you could incorporate cron jobs here ;)

I was building a new version of YugabyteDB vagrant box with packer and virtual box. Because we (Yugabyte) have a new preview release out.

I also suggest having a look at Vagrant (https://www.vagrantup.com/) for learning kind of work. It makes running isolated env easy and clean.

Another point to consider is how difficult is it to install the API Gateway or redeploy the gateway when changes are made. Check what installation options are offered. Most modern API Gateways can be installed in many different ways(Package based, Docker, Helm, RPM) in any environment (Linux, Windows, macOS). For example, one of the biggest advantages of Kong is its wide range of installation choices, with pre-made containers such as Docker and Vagrant so you can get a deployment running quickly.

Laravel wanted to make the entire PHP development process as seamless as possible. At the time, Laravel achieved this with Laravel Homestead, apre-packaged Vagrant box. Everything you would need would be bundled into a virtual machine, nice and neat, away from your OS. And this was how I was introduced to Vagrant. A means of packaging virtual machines into a portable format, so you could easily create local development environments. Vagrant worked by using a Vagrantfile to describe the virtual machine you would want to use, how it would be provisioned, the ports you would forward, and the filepaths you would want shared from host to guest. All of these tasks would be handled by the provider, the underlying virtual machine program itself, in my case, VirtualBox. Perhaps the one thing I liked the most about Vagrant, was the ability to provision my machine, clear down if I wanted to and have it back in a clean state for development.

OVirt (the free version of RHEV) https://www.ovirt.org/ fits the bill for enterprisey environments

Anyone have any experience with oVirt ?: https://www.ovirt.org/

Or you can go open-source at varying levels of simplicity, from Proxmox to oVirt (probably closest to vSphere) to OpenStack.

oVirt is an open-source, distributed virtualization solution for managing your whole enterprise infrastructure. Features include rich, web-based user interfaces; integrated management of hosts, storage and network configuration; live migration of virtual machines and disks between hosts and storage; and high availability of virtual machines in the event of host failure. needmorehardware offers a "big up for Ovirt, which is Redhat based."

It's not fancy, but I've had a lot of success with oVirt. It's great if you just want simple VMs and it has good features for managing VMs across multiple hardware servers and using shared storage.

Given you need a free/open-source hypervisor, consider using oVirt on top of production servers and KVM/libvirt on your workstations. oVirt does the same job as VMware ESXi virtualizing your server. https://www.ovirt.org/