The reason for "one big fire-breathing" server is that we needed something that powerful for processing data in a decent amount of time, we have a smaller server at the moment and it's just not cutting it. Basically the server will be used for processing a variety of stuff, from files a few mb in size, to data sets made up of multiple files each several GBs in size. We've already crashed the smaller server trying to process such data files several times.
It does say that the licence in the essentials is for 6 CPUs though? and a user on another site told me that the licence can be divided how I like? i.e. it would suit my system. You're all telling me that's not the case? Because at the price of the standard edition per processor we'll probably just end up going for a free alternative, like oracle's, or just not have a hypervisor at all.