You've pretty much figured it out. With the way licensing is going on with VMware(specifically the vCloud Suite), the strategy I find worthwhile is utilizing two socket systems with 256 or 384GB of RAM if CPU is not your limiting resource. This still allows high density, but not so much as throwing twice as many virtual machines on a four socket 512GB of RAM system. I've been down the road of both setups and the four socket systems were pure hell when the host hardware had issue. Without 10GbE at the time, maintenance was also a pain.
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