Could also look at a direct hypervisor, such as OVirt (upstream of RHV).

oVirt is a management platform on top of CentOS 7/8 and KVM. You can (and I have done) use Cockpit and oVirt on the same box.

I understand that. I should have explained a bit more than what I said. I meant instead of having a standard system with KVM, like using a normal CentOS host and running oVirt engine on top of it, use the oVirt Node image (which I know is also CentOS based) so that the host only includes the virtualization and management related functionality/packages.

I will admit I don't have a whole lot of experience with bare-hypervisor (or bare-like) setups, outside of a little bit of time in RHV at my last employer.