Quote - Whenever i need to do this kind of thing, i use VirtualBox (https://www.virtualbox.org/). It has the ability to pause and save the machine state practically anytime and it is very reliable, more reliable at least than every program i know that supports this kind of pause/resume natively. It is free, but when you want to use windows with it, you need an additional windows license.

That's a good idea... 

...the only issue I'd see with using a hypervisor / virtualiser set up is the added memory / processor implications of running an OS within an OS... and there's some degree of added disk latency too usually... unless you can give your guest pass-thru disk access.

But if you can counter for that with a beefy enough system, etc... then virtualisation is definitely a great approach to take... for lots of stuff