I use proxmox because I am a tinkerer and VMs help me tinker without worrying about making major mistakes that might brick my server. If I want to try something new, just spin up a test VM and try it out, the rest of my stacks are safe and if I muck up the test VM I’m tinkering with, just delete it and start again.

I started with KVM-QEMU, which proxmox is based on, with virt-manager front end. Can do all the same things, but can be installed on most distros. Will let you get your feet wet with VMs without having to format and install proxmox.