Bring the sysadmin a box of donuts (or scotch, if it’s that kind of place) and ask again.
Barring that, if you have admin rights and your laptop is running Windows you can enable Hyper-V[0] and get a great hypervisor that comes in the box. (If you’re already using WSL2, you’re already doing virtualization). If you’re on macOS, try to find something that uses Hypervisor.framework (multipass[1] is good if you can get along with Ubuntu) so you don’t need to install any kexts.
But this is really something you should bring up with your manager, it sounds like it’d be difficult to get any good work done without being able to run tests in a not-production environment.
0: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/virtualization/hyper-v-on-w...