You may want to check out Proxmox, i use it for the cloud as VM env., it is amazing!, not sure how it would work
however on strictly a desktop environment. It is free, even though it bugs you to sign up for support.

-tl

On Wed, Apr 22, 2015 at 11:43 AM, David Collier-Brown <davec-b@rogers.com> wrote:
On 04/21/2015 09:45 PM, Giles Orr wrote:
Today at work we had an interesting discussion about Digital
Ocean: the suggestion was made (and undoubtedly it's obvious to many
on this list, but it was eye-opening to me, I'm still getting my head
around disposable machines) that if you weren't sure an upgrade to a
droplet would work, just clone it, do the upgrade on the clone and see
how it goes.  Then you can make your decision and destroy the unwanted
version.
...
I've already ruled out OpenVZ as it looks like all virtualized systems
have to use the same kernel.
On Solaris, we did tons with very-lightweight VMs, using code for security isolation that could create "containers" that looked just like machines.

The only limitation was the common OS version, and you could be ahead of the evrsion in userspace stuff like shared libraries.  We rarely found cases where we wanted a different OS, just some where we wanted to emulate an older one.

--dave

--
David Collier-Brown,         | Always do right. This will gratify
System Programmer and Author | some people and astonish the rest
davecb@spamcop.net           |                      -- Mark Twain