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 b

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.