I've run barebones hypervisors in production for years; KVM is head and shoulders above everything else I've tried. libvirt and virsh provide a reasonably nice

I've run barebones hypervisors in production for years; KVM is head and shoulders above everything else I've tried. libvirt and virsh provide a reasonably nice interface if you don't need web-based tooling, and of course config management makes everything a lot easier to maintain. I haven't used salt, but if it has mature tooling for what you need, KVM would be a no-brainer for me.