Fred, you are thinking with too much common business sense. Of course technical you could solve it that way. ICT people however are thinking like managers of a fast-food restaurant. Only delivering things than can deliver fast and cheap and wanting the billing and image of a first class high society one.  It is the swing tree cartoon. Have a look wat is placed in datacenters as rack-mounted machines they have quite different specs as seen wit desktops. The organization with that is server based no desktop installations being allowed.as it will creak the datacenter operations strategy. The bare Iron can have 32 processors and 300 Gb (even more as that). As the goal is cost optimization the deliver some 60 desktop out of that sharing that same hardware. Having several of those being installed in racks you can serve a lot of virtual desktops. I do not know the exact values but this the approach. That is your virtualized desktop.  The 4 core 16Gb is more the figure of a virtualized Windows Server needing with that is a Windows Server license and a SAS server license (It is a licensing issue). These values are based on what is commonly seen as being sufficient for server processes. That is normally not sufficient with analytics eg SAS. These two options is what is commonly offered by the ICT datacenter (Cloud or internal). Everyone asking for something different as of these choices is an obstructive item. Does not fit into the system. ... View more