New virtual environment deployment. Best practises [closed]

Solution 1:

Windows Server Core is paid version of Windows, it just has no GUI... What you most probably want is called free Hyper-V Server.

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/virtualization/hyper-v/hyper-v-server-2016

StarWind / Veeam guys work just fine, people run hundreds of nodes configured this way.