This is sort of what I'm doing, except not really considering virtualization as a serious option. I've worked with it a lot in the past and it's been awkward and annoying. I'll go as far as containers, but I'm seriously not seeing what virtualization would add here other than obstacles.

I'm also feeling out what's a way of working with this machine that isn't a huge pain in the ass. When you've got one instance running on one machine, manual deployments is fine, but I think something more CI-driven is probably going to be necessary to keep sane with 8 index shards and a test environment as well.

Kubernetes would be an option but I have bad experiences with that too. A bit too much spooky action at a distance for my taste. Whole ecosystem feels very fragile and churny in a way I'm not very happy with, and the abstractions designed for hiding away the complexities of dealing with a cluster make running it on a single machine where those abstractions aren't necessary just pointlessly awkward.