[vel0city]

They've got a little over 5,000 stores. Probably a few different offices. Each store probably has several VMs or so so they can continue to run isolated if their connectivity to the mothership disappears briefly. You'll probably want the basics of running some kind of local auth service (maybe AD, maybe something else), your system running the POS platform which might even be an app server and a database server as separate VMs, probably some VM running various building management stuff, a VM to run the security camera platform, I dunno what else.

That's just for the operations of the local stores and we're now at probably >25,000 VMs and we've only touched the retail locations. We still haven't addressed logistics locations, corporate offices, stuff to manage their customer-facing applications and websites, etc.

When I first saw 40,000 VMs I too thought it was a bit excessive, but when you're an org wit several thousand locations that you want to be somewhat self-sufficient things add up quickly!