Hardware for virtualisation

Good Afternoon,

It has been a long while since I last posted here...

I am after some advice. I volunteer for a local Hospital Radio Station and look after their IT systems.

We currently have a number of hardware servers providing various functions from DC, DNS, File shares and application servers.

I am looking to virtualize the estate using VSphere ESXi and the VSphere Client. I have had a play around with a couple of desktop PCs that I have knowing around and I have successfully set up and configured some VMs. The challenge I have is around hardware.

I understand that hardware resources can be allocated to VMs by using hardware passthrough. Given the nature of the service that we provide we are heavily reliant on audio. As Such our VM host would likely need to have multiple soundcards to allow recording on VMs.

The two boxes that I was playing around with did not not support hardware passthrough so I was not able to test this.

Could I use multiple USB Sound Cards to support this functionality?

Also as we are a charity, does anyone know of any places that offer second hand/reconditioned rack servers suitable for VMWare? and are there any key things to look out for when purchasing hardware for virtualisation.

Thanks