Besides VMWare it always seemed the easiest for me to quickly make a Windows VM or so. Everything else usually had more configuration steps. But that’s been a while ago. There could very well have been easier tools available in the mean time. I never bothered to look.

I only ever used “permanent” virtualization once on my server. I think with Xen. But it didn’t give me any benefits for my use case so I dropped it later on. Also probably at least ten years ago.