VM provisioning vs docker for development

Hey. I was getting ready to reformat a laptop to test deployment of applications. To make sure my instructions / automations aren't missing anything, I've reformatted this thing a few times to test an installation from scratch. I'm wondering what would be a next good step for that – running some server provisioning software with a minimal operating system that can create a bunch of operating systems and spaces, or a single OS install with something like docker containers for the isolated target systems.

With this current project and the previous project my company took on, just using docker isn't always an option to ship for the client. I'm willing to use something that's not docker, I'm pretty open to ideas here. Google lead me to spacewalk but their website mentions it was discontinued in may of this year. It's open source so maybe a popular fork will take over, but I don't really know a lot about that space or if it would be better or worse than something like docker.

Thanks!