If you have 1 system with 10 VMs running on it and 1 disk, the performance of any (not in-memory) database will be bad. Especially with spinning disks (no matter how expensive they are) is going to be a major contention point. With a really good SSD you may be able to pull off a few instances, but performance stress testing will likely always hit either that or a CPU bottleneck (if things configured correctly for system).
Pretty good chance with 4gb heaps and a stress workload you are going to be hitting GC and memory issues, do you have any monitoring around that? Can use visualvm and connect to the ip:7199 (ip set in cassandra-env.sh).
8gb of ram per vm is on the minimum spec end. You want at least 8gb of JVM heap with space for the offheap stuff and OS. A 16gb system is likely sufficient. Once again the shared disk will kill performance so it will only go so far. but should be able to do far better than 4k/sec.