Is this the best solution if I want a standalone bare metal server that can spin up VMs? I'm looking for the closest analog to for example, an open source digitalocean style platform. Also interested in something that lets me manage CUDA/TF/PyTorch jobs. I know and understand docker and kvm but not kubernetes yet. TBH I find this entire space totally confusing.
If you want a standalone bare metal server that can spin up full-fat VMs that will live for a long time with some expectation of persistence, you are probably better looking at something like VMware ESXi (free for individual use on a single host), Joyent SmartOS or something based on KVM, Xen etc.
If you only want to run lightweight containers for comparably shorter periods of time and worry about data persistence through some other means, then things like Fedora CoreOS, VMware Photon are designed for that purpose.
If Ubuntu is acceptable, Canonical LXD/LXC is worth looking at - containers, but full OS ones.
Just so simple to configure and use, and minimal overhead.
Have used it without much problems for all kinds of workloads.
I understand that. I should have explained a bit more than what I said. I meant instead of having a standard system with KVM, like using a normal CentOS host and running oVirt engine on top of it, use the oVirt Node image (which I know is also CentOS based) so that the host only includes the virtualization and management related functionality/packages.
I will admit I don't have a whole lot of experience with bare-hypervisor (or bare-like) setups, outside of a little bit of time in RHV at my last employer.
That's fair, if it only is "a" server, then one has to weigh pros and cons. I said OpenStack because of the speed of spawning VMs ready to go, cattle style. Traditional VM platforms haven't really been able to do that.
