Before I begin, I am using the term Type 1 loosely for a lightweight OS/Hypervisor layer.

I am looking for a solution wherein a desktop OS is virtualized so that the actual hardware is abstracted, the OS is fully portable, and yet still able to be Windows 7 or Windows 10. I need the virtualization layer to be largely unnoticeable as this station would be used by users that are largely novice computer users at best and tend to be easily confused when a host OS is visible. Therefore, VirtualBox, vmware Workstation, or vmware Player are all not preferred in the environment.

The reason I am looking for this situation instead of just installing windows is that the physical environment that the PC lives in is highly acidic and we end up changing PCs about every 3 months. The software is temperamental to install and configure and the hardware is very specific in what type of serial port it will transmit data across. We have attempted to place the PC in a remote location with KVM extenders and multiple types of serial extenders or adapters in conjunction to no avail.

I have searched fruitlessly for something like ESXi with pass-through capabilities for a guest OS. I would have thought that this would have already been a thing and I have seen several posts looking for such a thing, but I haven't seen a good solution in any of these posts. Does anyone know of a solution I have overlooked?