Two questions about farming

I've been doing research all night, and I just found out that you can no longer use a virtual machine to run perks (rip) and I have enough RAM to run several hundred and still play video games.

I've run into some IRL issues and I'm pretty much screwed, so I figured hey. I got a few grand I can drop into building a sizable farm. I already bought a server, got myself started in some niches, but I need something to help sustain myself while those build up.

1.) Is there any perk-like passives I can run in a VM?

2.) Does anyone have secret information they'd be willing to share about farming efficiently? I've done bot farms in mmorpgs, but that seems to be a dying area and it's pretty hard to get setup in most games.

I have an insane amount of resources at my disposal and I want to turn them into something. (Like we're talking several hundred gigs of unused RAM and knowledge of how to program some quality bots.)