I know you asked about VMs, but fwiw there are GPU-capable containers now: https://docs.nvidia.com/datacenter/cloud-native/container-toolkit/latest/install-guide.html
Used one of these and the setup is as easy as it sounds. It can run Houdini, Stable Diffusion.
I have set up forgejo, which is a fork of gitea. It’s a git forge, but its ticketing system is quite good.