Optimal hardware requierements

Greetings!

This is my 1st post!

Our small university wants to host a Drupal / H5P server  so we can store there eLearning content for a couple hundred courses, used by a few thousand students. We started creating H5P objects in Moodle, but they are only accessible from inside the Moodle course in which they were created. This means that the objects must be manually transferred from course to course to course, rather than being accessed from a central repository.

So, we have access to a grant that will pay for a server, and would like to futureproof ourselves.  I looked at Drupal minimum requirements, which are too modest.  If we can splash a few thousand dollars to add more hardware to the Univesity's vSphere server, which would give us a robust virtual machine, and get some bang for our buck, what would be a comfortable amount of CPU, RAM, disk space, etc. to ask for?

And, by the same token, it is OK to have it seat on vSphere or do we need a physical machine for that?

I hope I posted in the right forum :)

Many thanks in advance!

mcnabb