Best free (preferably open source) type 1 hypervisor

I'm planning to repurpose my old PC (AMD Athlon FX-8350, 32 GB of RAM, Geforce GTX 770) as a server. For the fileserver part my intention is to use FreeNAS. But since the machine would be fairly overpowered for that use case I thought of using a type 1 hypervisor which would leave me all options open for further use. I know the gold standard would be vSphere by VMWare but despite the fact that cheap licenses can be purchased on ebay and there is even a basic free version called vSphere Hypervisor I'd gladly go for something more open, preferably even open source and free. I know of KVM but the pure command line administration is not really my preferred user interface. Any other solutions? Maybe something you can recommend because you have used it yourself?

P.S. It's not that I cannot live with a command line interface, it's just that I prefer a decent GUI, it makes administration so much more comfortable.

Thank you guys, much appreciated

Hi folks
If using a Linux host --KVM /QEMU

works brilliantly

you can also if you have the right hardware easily pass thru graphics etc so in theory good for games too although I'm not a gamer.

Using Libvirt (Virtual machine manager) etc is an easy GUI way of managing VM's on KVM.

Probably the most difficult bit would be setting up virtio and a network bridge -- virtio improves the I/O no end and the bridge enables lan communication over your whole network -- default NAT doesn't allow communication with HOST although internet access works fine.

Plenty of easy google links -- look for KVM/QEMU on say arch linux. UBUNTU / FEDORA have pages too -- method is similar.



For the Network card (bridged)





Cheers
jimbo