Thanks for taking the time to post such detailed information in your reply, it's really appreciated.
However, before diving in and heading off in a different direction than I had been looking previously, let me take a step back to see if I have some concepts clear in my head.
1) If I have a bare metal machine in my living room (or other physically accessible environment), I can turn it on, install from the SME ISO, and then have a working SME server (this I have done countless times).
2) If I so choose, I can instead install some other OS on that machine, create a virtual environment, and install SME within that virtual environment (this I have also done, but found it less useful).
3) If I don't have physical access to the above, I must activate a virtual hosted machine instance (with someone, somewhere, in the cloud, whatever), install some other software (proxmox, Centos, anything other than SME), then create another virtual instance within that software to install and run SME.
From the two responses so far, it seems that SME is not able to be installed on a virtual host as if it were the bare metal machine in my room.
Can anyone explain if this is correct? If so, why?
Again, I'd like to be able to install SME on a VPS as if it were concept 1. Having to virtualize within an already virtual environment just seems like an unnecessary layer of abstraction. Though if that is the current state of SME, then so be it.