Is there a general guideline for:

You have 20 apps running concurrently. They are all related. Sometimes (every few seconds) there is significant communication between them. You have a single Dell 740, Silver CPU and a slim 32GB memory an a single 1 TB disk.

Is it better to run all the apps on a single large VM or spread the load over multiple smaller VMs. Your resources (the host) remain constant so are you losing if you spread the apps over multiple VMs? You have the same apps work load and you have added the overhead of additional VMs and communications if you split the workload.

I'm new to VMware but about 8 years experience with VirtualBox