Hey OP. I never done that myself, but I guess Running Nodes on a VM should be similar to cloud gaming. that means how many nodes you can run is totally depends on how strong your VM system is.
I don't know which virtual machine you would use but I heard VMWare is very Good:
https://www.vmware.com/products/workstation-pro.htmlAre masternodes even still a thing in 2024? The last time masternodes have been hot was in 2016-2017 with projects like Dash. The cryptocurrency industry has moved to staking now — which makes a bit more sense because it's pretty similar to dividends with stocks.
I believe that even if they are not much in craze anymore, it would still be a fun experiment, and running them on a VM sounds even more fun. Even I want to know how would that work in a VM. I think OP should definitely give it a try if he got the resources,