> I can see it being very time consuming and annoying to do repeated manual bare metal OS installs.

Well don't do that then. There's lots of other options. Probably the simplest is a single bare metal install on a simple filesystem on one device. run the filesystems under test on other storage dedicated to testing.

You could also boot into a network install and use local storage exclusively for testing.

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Farmadupe 3 hours ago | parent [-]

Yes exactly. The issueThe epherrality of the VMs isn't an issue, it's the _shared_ part that's the concern here. Going by the fact that the kernel is listed as "kernel 7.0.0-1012-azure" I feel like it's a fair risk that there may have been noisy neighbours.

	▲	fenio 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Obviously they could and probably were noisy neighbours. I'm not trying to hide that fact. Initial step for every benchmark is test of underlying device to at least reject completely unlucky cases. Also after almost 600 runs average is probably more or less correct... Also take a look at tests on real hardware. There are not many of them but there are some. I pointed to them in my first answer.