[jordanthoms]

I guess it's all relative, our largest cluster scales up to around 3000 VCPU and there's plenty of much larger ones out there.

You might be able to get better utilisation of your VMs by running a smaller number with more cores on each - I'd try 16vcpu nodes.

[randomswede]

At my previous workplace, one of the clusters I herded was 60-odd (physical) machines, 72 or 96 cores (honestly can't recall at this point) and 384 GB RAM (IIRC) per physical server. But, that place was a wee bit strange, in that we ran all our kubernetes in-house and started on bare metal.

And, yes, as a general recommendation, I would tend towards bigger, rather than smaller, nodes. There's a trade-off to be had, but you want each node to be at LEASt as large as the largest pod you intend to deploy, and you probably want at least some spare, on top of that.