Difficulty installing on vm that includes CPanel and Apache

Anything that doesn’t install CPanel. There are several topics about recommended ones. Digital Ocean is easy.

Ah. Then if you could just get rid of Apache and CPanel, you’d been in good shape. This seems like the easiest way forward from where you are.

The other way to go is keep CPanel and contrive to get your existing Apache to be a reverse proxy. You’ll be on your own, though, as there are too many install-specific holes to fall in for people to be of much help here.