Additional Polling Engine

Hello, I am building a new SolarWinds environment in a new forest and my plan was to create an additional NPM polling engine on a separate server. However, after doing some research I am not sure if there is any benefit in doing this vs. adding an additional engine to the primary server? (VMware environment)

Other questions:

Is there any benefit in adding the additional poller now vs. adding it when the need arises?

Is adding nodes to the additional poller a manual process or can this be done automatically, similar to load balancing?

Can someone please provide me with some insight on these questions?

Thanks in advance,

Jeff