Am I the only one who spins up a new VM in VMWare ESXi for things like this?

VIC containers for me - a full VM is a bit overkill for something this light :)

What's your setup like? I use VMWare workstation pro- I have Windows Enterprise 2019 LTSC N installed and snapshotted to a base VM.

Any time I need to do anything, I will full clone the base; with a decent SSD it takes maybe 10 seconds for the full clone and I have a full OS.

Actual ESXI on a decently powerful (33 cores, 512 gigs) machine. VMWare’s been really good to me, minus some points for occasional stupidity on upgrades.

Yeah, why don’t you just use a container?