i didnt have a problem with network ports (I use a switch) what I shouldve considered during purchasing was the number of drives (sata ports), pcie features (bifurcation, version, number of nvme slots)
I need to do high IOPs for my research now and I am stuck with raid0 commodity SSDs in 3 ports.
I'd check high I/O wait, specially if your all of the vms are on HDDs.
one of the solution I had for this issue was to have multiple DNS servers. solved it by buying a raspberry pi zero w and running a 2nd small instance of pihole there. I made sure that the piZeroW is plugged on a separate circuit in my home.