Multiple Virtual Machines Advice Needed

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Can I comfortably run 6 to 8 VM on the setup?

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The short answer is yes.

The CPU is overkill in my opinion. The workloads you described are not that CPU intensive.

128 GB of RAM is more than enough. I think a Windows 11 pro VM running that workload is going to use around 8 GB.

3 TB of storage sounds about right.

I don't think Hyper-V running on Windows 11 Pro can take advantage of multiple NICs. ETA: Do you even need four NICs? Your Internet connection is probably going to be the bottleneck.

I'm in the process of moving away from VMware. So, I've spent the last month evaluating different virtualization platforms. Hyper-V seems the least feature rich of all the platforms I tested. I went with Proxmox.

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am I better off using a Xeon processor and going an actual server route? (Xeon W5-2465 Processor, ECC Ram, etc)

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If they were doing financial transactions, I would. But for your purposes, I wouldn't bother. If those were 8 physical PCs none of them would be running ECC.

For the most part you should be okay for light use, only thing that stands out is you didn't mention a HBA.

You are going to be hurting for disk I/O for the VM's. 6-8 Win11 machines will absolutely bring your disk access to a crawl, during any events that require a lot of disk read/writes like patching, scans, boot/shutdown etc without a higher end HBA (with cache and preferably battery backup). If you start swapping to disk you are really done.

Using HyperV ? the above DEFINITELY applies in double. I'm not sure if it's an overall thing with Windows or just a crappy disk scheduler, but HyperV really suffers. I'm a Unix/Linux guy so tweaking on Windows' guts is a bit out of my realm. I did try this on a LOADED R840, with 12 instances of Win11 in HyperV was awful, even with staggered patching it was pretty much unusable for 2 days.

What is your use case?

No issues with running windows on proxmox. I have a dell server running proxmox with a Windows VM running on it.

To the OP, I wouldnt use Hypervisor on Windows. It will run the VMs with no issue, but you can't pass USB devices to the VMs from the host.

First off, thanks for all the replies.

To answer a few of the questions:

1. Yesterday afternoon I did additional research and am realizing this may be more than I can tackle on my own. I'm a very low level IT guy and am realizing I may need to hire an actual IT pro to help facilitate my needs on the VMs.

2. The actual VMs will be used for Mineral/Surface Title research (landmen and abstractors). As for security or full access to my network, the VM will allow be to control who/what is accessed on my network vs having to map a network drive on their person pc.. Or am I flawed in this as well?

3. Not sure what HBA is or why I didn't mention it?? Will look into it.

4. An IT buddy mention provisioning desktops through Azure but again, this went a bit beyond my IT understanding will need to research it more. My understanding is it would be better to build VMs from a box than through Azure.

5. What I did conclude is I can build a "server" with a Xeon W5 16 Core Processor, DDR5 Ram, SSDs for VMs a M.2 for main pc boot, all in a regular pc workstation environment for ~$550 per vm. This allows me to scale up to 10vm from one box..

6. I will do some research on Proxmox and keep doing appropriate research before pulling the trigger.

Again, thanks for the feedback and not making me feel too stupid about doing this!

Make life easy and just run HyperV with the 8 VMs. We have a similar setup at a few locations and it works fine. No one complains, Dell server with RAID10 and a bunch of memory.