While I was trying out different operating systems and servers for my home lab, I recently decided to replicate the tech stack used at my workplace. RHEL had killed off CentOS, which would have been my first choice, but RHEL is also free for developers. So, I signed up for an RHEL developer account and got my free subscription.
I downloaded and installed Virtual box on my desktop, configured a Linux VM with 8 Gigs of RAM and 100 GB of Storage. Post-installation and subscription to the license(required to allow software updates), I set it up so that it starts with my PC startup in headless mode. A single line bat file is enough to create a script to start the VM in the background. Then we just ssh into the server to do whatever we want.
Personally, I am trying out minikube for a clustered deployment of my side project. The options are limitless where you can do anything you want with an RHEL box. It helps RHEL is stable and an enterprise solution. There is another VM running Fedora that is my primary development machine. Having your servers and development environments as VMs really helps out in trying things that might break your machine without fear.
