Thanks for taking real-world options into discussion. A lot of this is a matter of taste and a question of availability on each market place, also about how long you want to or can wait for getting all the parts. Here are a few comments for the conversial items:
- if your Host is a game server for several game VMs, confirming that would take a lot of speculation away from the following?
- I wouldn't personally buy any dell/lenovo, but start building it on my own using an Asus motherboard or something else that is known to be good. Cheap dell/lenovos have more than likely sub-standard motherboards and also useless parts like small HDDs. When you need to upgrade them, what is the point in buing some thing that doesn't work in the first place but getting a bad chassis, uselessly small memory cards that need to be scrapped&changed and all that.
- this is about running 8 at the same time. Having 4 and using them in turns is a completely different scenario. (this matter is not confirmed, but that was the first thing I asked about). So, what is it in those examples and what is the requirement
- HDDs are useless for running this. Do NOT try to even start up 2-3 VM computers from a single HDD at the same time. It might take 30 min to get rid of the situation when the system as a whole gets stuck. I haven't tried with the latest HDDs, neither is there a reason to try them out (if you need to buy them). You can use several HDDs in a tower workstation, but that is hugely cumbersome (something that I used 10 years ago), in comparison to having a single SDD for a few VMs
- the only real question is the graphics card and using 8 VMs (or at least several) to share hardware accelaration of the Host, AT THE SAME TIME with 15-20 fps.
- price of 2012 Server OS is around 5 000 - 6 000 USD + tax. I don't know what buying it with tens of dollars in those WEB pages that sell them with tens of dollars means in each country. If it is illegal to buy them, or even sell them, this matter shouldn't be discussed here
- there is also no reason to try to use Windows 10 on the Host. You are much better of using some Linux version (like some Ubuntu/Debian - distro, or other kind of distro if non-Debian ones are more to your liking)
As for the questions of @inuysha1 system, here are some commets:
- not sure what these 4 are doing? If you use it alone, you cannot run them in games at the same time, not for anything useful that is. So what really happens there?
- you need to continue analysing it. You said that CPU is 100%, it looks like that is the bottle neck. 4 threads is too little for 4 VMs (really) running. Maybe Win 10 Home version is just bad in distributing power for threads, or whatever you have?
- why CPU is so high? Maybe the distribution into cores is not optimal within VMs? They might take more power than they really need if you let them. Try with a lower values of prosessors/threads per VM.
- maybe RAM is too little and does slow everythig down (and results in large cpu and disk load). Try with a larger memory for one VM and see if that works better when running alone. Go from there, but buy more RAM.
- not sure how good that graphics card is. In any case, it is as much about drivers than the card itself. Have you checked that you have upto date drivers ... whatever that means (source can be Windows, Dell, card manufacturer, chip manufacturer, community and version can be latest stable, beta or alpha, drivers).
- but yet again, it depends on what you are actually doing with those VMs. Graphics might mean nothing or that is the most important thing ... do you even have graphics hardware acceleration on? Since you use the term "server", it points to using something else than games ... other applications are difficult to evaluate how much memory they need, because, for instance databases can take a lot of memory, but run slowly on a small memory ... depends on what they are and how you configure them and how quick they must be
I hope this explains further what the field of analysis is.
