Sorry for not including your original post. I've been pondering some similar questions lately and I find I'm approaching this topic from a different angle, so my comments aren't well suited to individually address your points/questions.

Giant up-front disclaimer: unless I specifically say so I haven't yet used any of the technologies and products mentioned below, but many or most have been discussed by sources I respect such as:
- Tom of Lawrence Systems
- Patrick of ServeTheHome

I have used VirtualBox (on Windows) and Hyper-V.

It sounds like you want to:
- Minimize multi-boot; limit it to only where absolutely required. This may require some P2V conversion of existing OS instances running on bare metal
- Consolidate VMs on to a more manageable platform. This may be less painful than you might think; some hypervisors can export VMs to a portable format, or convert or even directly run those created by other hypervisors
- Option: consider using containers rather than VMs, especially if you have multiple VMs that are based on a single OS such as a preferred Linux distro

To get started you might want to get at least one new machine to be a new home for VMs and/or containers, or convert an existing machine for that use. For new machines there are many options such as:
- Low power appliances such as https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h7U4fCj_Pos . Despite their modest processors and low TDP/passive cooling, people are running hypervisors and VMs on them
- Power-efficient servers such as https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0cN-bFZMysE (video a bit dated but shows the idea)
- Used enterprise servers from Dell, HP etc. Older generations can be quite inexpensive but still have good parts availability. You do have to put up with higher power draw and higher noise, especially for 1U servers. Some newer generations have lower power draw and noise as design goals and can be quite good in those areas. You can even find YouTube videos with recorded noise levels for some popular servers

I'm not sure I would use Hyper-V for anything other than a homogeneous, all-Windows environment or for one that doesn't want to support a hypervisor other than Hyper-V. For heterogeneous environments that aren't afraid of open-source, my feeling is FOSS alternatives are more robust and mature. VMWare being bought by Broadcom has raised some concerns about its ongoing suitability for the SMB market.

Two currently popular FOSS environments for homelabs and SMB are Proxmox and XCP-ng (based on Xen, which was formerly used by AWS). One place to start looking at them is https://forums.lawrencesystems.com/t/xcp-ng-vs-proxmox-2022/14200 . Tom concentrates on XCP-ng but he also has links there to a leading Proxmox proponent.

With products like this you can start thinking about:
- Clustering of multiple VM hosts, and migrating VMs amongst them as needed (even live migration in some cases!)
- High availability/failover
- Enterprise-grade features such as ZFS and software RAID (ZFS is now the default filesystem on Netgate appliances)

I consider support a critical factor:
- Will a hypervisor arbitrarily go EOL (like Microsoft)?
- Is there good community support?
- Is is possible to purchase service/support if needed or wanted?

h7U4fCj_Pos

0cN-bFZMysE