I shut down my server farm a little over a month ago to take interest in and support the Bitcoin infrastructure. Not all of my servers have been sold. Would it be at all beneficial to the community if I could add 20-30 VMs (to start with) that just run full nodes?
Yes, every person that runs a full node helps strengthen the network
The Bitcoin network exists because of all the people that participate, so if nobody runs full nodes or mines it's not a very strong network. If you mined that would be even better as that increases network security and decentralization, and it might even return you profit if you're good at it.
For running a full node, remember a few things though. Be sure you have port 8333 open, where it can accept incoming connections, otherwise you're not really 'helping' the network. If you show more than 8 connections everything should be working fine. Also, you probably don't need redundant nodes on the same IP, and which share the same bandwidth limits. What strengthens the network is geographically spaced nodes with sufficient bandwidth to reduce network latency. Last, your full node should be online 24/7 without experiencing frequent outages for best results. Hope that helps
