Comment by xolox

If you are at all comfortable with Linux system administration, manually setting up one or a handful of KVM/qemu powered virtual machines is not actually that hard at all (in my experience). If you like a GUI to guide your initial steps, "virt-manager" is pretty okay. I've been running 3-5 virtual machines for several years now based on a pretty vanilla Ubuntu Linux install (Debian would work just fine as well).

Now I do like a challenge every now and then, so I'm currently setting up Proxmox to gain live migrations and high availability for virtual machines, because I've become quite dependent on all of these services in virtual machines actually running successfully :-) even in the face of eventual hardware failure (like what happened to me in the past months).