With processor support for virtualization, the overhead is minimal. I personally use a Windows machine at home (for games, sigh) and run VMs for a Linux develo

With processor support for virtualization, the overhead is minimal. I personally use a Windows machine at home (for games, sigh) and run VMs for a Linux development machine and a few k8s nodes for testing. The performance inside the VMs is excellent. I think right now if you want to have a single-node testing cluster, you will be very happy with minikube and the VM it creates. If you want multiple nodes, you will be very happy with VMs; you can create, destroy, and inject errors right from the command-line without having to walk over to physical machines and manipulate them.