So when I started my job they already had a DB, NPM and NCM set up but our SolarWinds had been heavily neglected until I was hired to learn and to use SolarWinds. Months later We finally had to purchase our first Additional Polling engine! Now that we're at this point i'm really thinking about fixing and planning for future growth and development before I deploy my second polling engine 
However i'm still pretty new at using all of this and I need some advice on scaling up. I've watched most of the SolarWinds Scalability practices but i figure i'd get some more feedback before I go before my bosses to ask for a new pony 
. Currently we are running both a DB and our NPM/NCM modules and web server on VMs.
DB is running at 2 CPUs, 8 GB RAM, 140 GB of disk space.
NPM\NCM is running at 6 CPUs, 12 GB Ram, 100 GB disk space.
After reading/watching these videos they recommend 12 CPUs and 128 GB RAM as a physical server for the DB, but i'm wondering if we need something that beefy... We are a pretty small college all working in one location, running about 10K elements and i haven't noticed our SolarWinds Instance being too awful. Eventually i'm planning to plead the case to get SRM and NTM, but first I need to worry about planning for those and who knows what other products we'll get. 
So i'm wondering if anyone has some suggestions on getting this rolling?
Should i get a beefier dedicated server for most of my SolarWinds Modules to pile on one machine or should I just create a few more VMs as I need them? I'm aiming for a more centralized approach to scaling (mainly because we won't have to worry about having a second site). Any advice would be super appreciated!
