You can actually install Linux with Hyper-V. I use Windows 8 Pro x64 much of the time at home and have a Debian VM set up with Hyper-V. Though, I do not use a desktop, I just SSH into it for development. Plus side is you can keep a 512MB VM running all the time without caring if it's consuming resources that way.

Hmm, fragile in what way? For me, VMware Player has had only a couple minor hiccups in several years, and even VirtualBox has been (buggier but) very usable. (My machines are non-gaming.)

I had breaking issues like Unity crashing on a fresh VM install of Ubuntu.

I've worked with different virtualization tools on different machines, the biggest hassle is configuring the image which is done once by the teacher - once it's set up it's really easy to distribute it and then it should work identically on all clients assuming they installed the software and image correctly.