We used to boot ~3x the servers we needed, run a hard load on them for a while, performance test them, and kill the "weakest" 2/3rds. You can get a bunch of nod

We used to boot ~3x the servers we needed, run a hard load on them for a while, performance test them, and kill the "weakest" 2/3rds. You can get a bunch of nodes on iffy hardware or greedy neighbors (or all on the same physical box) and see significant performance improvements that way. Of course this was a decade ago, but I think the fundamentals are still sound, as far as being skeptical about the quality and longevity of your nodes in a virtual environment.