In the IT world, apart from strategic design, you have to get your hands dirty. Unfortunately it's not always easy to test everything at work, even if you have a staging environment. The best thing to do before testing on production is to test at home! VMware often comes to the rescue. Either you are on Windows , Linux on MAC, VMWare can be installed so as to virtualize everything. VMware workstation is an " industry standard for running multiple operating systems as virtual machines on a single Windows, Linux PC". For MAC users the product is VMWare Fusion. It's a hypervisor or virtual machine monitor, that creates and runs virtual machines 1 . At first i have to say that you can do the same things, more or less with the free Oracle Virtual Box. For me VMWare is a more mature software, a leader in it's field and with way better feature-set and GUI.

Apart from IT (dev)ops stuff, I also am a fan of home automation. While juggling arounf several youtube and discord channels I learned about Proxmox VE. VE stands for virtualization environment. In Distrowatch.com, Proxmox is described as: Proxmox is a commercial company offering specialised products based on Debian GNU/Linux, notably Proxmox Virtual Environment and Proxmox Mail Gateway. Proxmox Virtual Environment is an open-source virtualisation platform for running virtual appliances and virtual machines. Proxmox Mail Gateway is a mail gateway with anti-spam and anti-virus features. The products are offered as free downloads with paid-for support and subscription options. So Proxmox is the company that creates a virtualization hypervisor and a mail gateway. They offer the free version of their Debian based distro with GNU AGPL, v3 license. This is a hypervisor with lots of bells and whistles and a very good web GUI.