x86-64 instance profiles

Balanced

Balanced profiles provide a mix of performance and scalability for more common workloads. The Balanced profile family includes profiles with and without instance storage. The following table shows all Balanced profiles that are available for Intel® x86-64, and AMD x86-64 processors.

Balanced profiles with the bx2d prefix are available in the US South (Dallas), US East (Washington DC), Canada (Toronto), United Kingdom (London), Germany (Frankfurt), Spain (Madrid), Japan (Tokyo), Japan (Osaka), and Australia (Sydney) regions.

The following table shows all balance profiles that are available for x86-64.

AMD-based virtual machines use AMD EPYC Milan processors. Compute capabilities are limited to AMD EPYC Rome capabilities.

Compute

Compute profiles are best for workloads with intensive CPU demands, such as high web traffic workloads, production batch processing, and front-end web servers. The Compute profile family includes profiles with and without instance storage. The following table shows all Compute profiles that are available for ® x86-64.

Compute profiles with the cx2d prefix are available in the US South (Dallas), US East (Washington DC), Canada (Toronto), United Kingdom (London), Germany (Frankfurt), Spain (Madrid), Japan (Tokyo), Japan (Osaka), and Australia (Sydney) regions.

The following table shows all compute profiles that are available for x86-64.

Memory

Memory profiles are best for memory intensive workloads, such as large caching workloads, intensive database applications, or in-memory analytics workloads. The Memory profile family includes profiles with and without instance storage. The following table shows all Memory profiles that are available for Intel® x86-64.

Memory profiles with the mx2d prefix are available in the US South (Dallas), US East (Washington DC), Canada (Toronto), United Kingdom (London), Germany (Frankfurt), Spain (Madrid), Japan (Tokyo), Japan (Osaka), and Australia (Sydney) regions.

Very High Memory

Very High Memory profiles offer 1 vCPU to 14 GiB of RAM to host small to medium-sized in-memory databases, OLAP services such as SAP NetWeaver, and other memory intensive applications. All Very High Memory profiles are provisioned with temporary SSD-backed instance storage at no additional charge. The following Very High Memory profiles are available on Intel® x86 processors.

The 3rd generation profile with the vx3d prefix is a beta feature that is available for evaluation and testing purposes. This profile is available only in the Toronto (ca-tor) region to provision virtual server instances on 4th Generation Intel® Xeon® Scalable processors, the Intel 8474C processor (previously code named Sapphire Rapids). For more information about the capabilities of the new profiles, see Next generation instance profiles.

• The vx2d profiles are on the Cascade Lake processors.
• The vx3d profiles are on the Sapphire Rapids processors.

Ultra High Memory

Ultra High Memory profiles are hosted exclusively on the latest generation Intel® Xeon® Platinum Cascade Lake server hosts. This profile family offers our highest vCPU to memory ratio with 28 GiB of memory for every 1 vCPU of compute and up to 5.7 TiB of available RAM and is optimized for running memory intensive applications and in-memory database such as SAP HANA, Memcached, or Redis. All Very High Memory profiles are provisioned with temporary SSD-backed instance storage at no additional charge.

The following Ultra High Memory profiles are available for x86-64 processors:

GPU

The GPU profile family includes -v100, -a100, -l4, and -l40S and -h100 profiles. The GPU profile family includes profiles with and without instance storage.

• GPU -v100 profiles include 1 or 2 NVIDIA V100 PCIe 16 GB GPUs. All OS images are supported on these GPU profiles.
• Select availability GPU -a100 profiles includes 8 NVIDIA A100 NVlink 80 GB GPUs. The a100 offering is available to select customers. This GPU profile supports only Linux OS images Ubuntu or RHEL.
• GPU -l4 profiles include NVIDIA L4 24 GB GPUs.
• GPU -l40S profiles include NVIDIA L40S 48 GB GPUs.
• Select availability GPU -h100 profiles include NVIDIA H100 80 GB GPUs. The system is an HGX design. The H100 offering is available in the following regions and zones: London (eu-gb-2), Sydney (au-syd-2), Toronto (ca-tor-3), Madrid (eu-es-3), Washington DC (us-east-3), Tokyo (jp-tok-3), Sao Paulo (br-sao-1), Dallas (us-south-1), and Frankfurt (eu-de-2).

See Download drivers to review the most current versions that are supported. NVIDIA GPU drivers must be installed separately.

Storage Optimized

Storage Optimized profiles are hosted exclusively on Intel® Xeon® Platinum Cascade Lake servers. This profile family offers our highest vCPU to instance storage ratio with 300 GB of storage for every 1 vCPU and is optimized for running data lake and other workloads that require more intensive data capabilities. All storage optimized profiles are provisioned with temporary SSD-backed instance storage at no additional charge. For more information, see Lifecycle of instance storage.

Storage Optimized profiles use the Storage optimized (ox2) instance storage quota, for instance, storage quota tracking. Unlike other profiles, which use the Instance storage quota. For more information, see Quotas.

Storage Optimized profiles are available in the US South (Dallas), US East (Washington DC), United Kingdom (London), Germany (Frankfurt), EU Spain (Madrid), Japan (Tokyo), and Japan (Osaka) regions.

The following Storage Optimized profiles are available for x86-64 processors:

Confidential computing profiles

Select availability

The following profiles support Confidential computing with Intel Software Guard Extensions (SGX) and secure boot.

The confidential computing profiles are available only in the Dallas (us-south) and Frankfurt (eu-de) regions.

For more information about confidential computing, see Confidential computing for x86 Virtual Servers for VPC.

Bandwidth allocation

Instance bandwidth is allocated between volume bandwidth and networking bandwidth. The bandwidth capacity (Bandwidth Cap) is determined by the virtual server profile that you select during instance provisioning. For example, a bx2-2x8 balanced server profile allows a bandwidth cap of 4 Gbps.

Block Storage volume notes for profiles

When you create secondary data volumes, you select a volume profile that best meets your requirements. Volume profiles are available as three predefined tiers or as a custom profile. These volume profiles relate to virtual server instance profiles:

• A 3 IOPS general-purpose tier profile provides IOPS/GB performance that is suitable for a virtual server instance Balanced profile.
• A 5-IOPS tier profile provides IOPS/GB performance that is suitable for a virtual server instance Compute profile.
• A 10-IOPS tier profile provides IOPS/GB performance that is suitable for a virtual server instance Memory profile.

Viewing profile configurations

You can view available profile configurations by using the IBM Cloud console or the CLI. In the IBM Cloud console, you can select from popular profile configurations that support the most common use cases.

ibmcloud is instance-profiles

curl -X GET \
"$vpc_api_endpoint/v1/instance/profiles?version=2021-02-23&generation=2" \
-H "Authorization: $iam_token"

Next generation instance profiles

The 3rd generation of IBM Cloud Virtual Servers for VPC are available to provision in all regions. This new generation features virtual server profile families that are hosted exclusively on Intel 4th Generation Xeon Scalable processors to provide the most powerful and performant general-purpose profiles available. These 3rd generation profiles provide the following enhancements:

• Improved performance with DDR 5 memory DIMMs, PCI Gen 5 interconnects, and more memory per vCPU than prior generation profiles.
• A wide variety of profiles sizes with core to memory ratios optimized to maximize performance and economics for intensive workloads.
• Enhanced integrated accelerators that feature AMX-512, AVX, and enhanced crypto acceleration.
• Instances are started by default with Open Virtual Machine Format (OVMF), and run in Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI) mode for enhanced security.
• Local instance storage is included with all profiles for ease of access to temporary storage and swap space. For more information about the temporary nature of instance storage, see Lifecycle of instance storage.
• A 3rd generation profile can be resized to a 2nd generation profile. A 2nd generation profile can be resized to a 3rd generation profile. For more information, see Resizing between Gen 2 and Gen 3 profiles.

Intel Hyper-Threading Technology

All Intel® x86-64 servers have Hyper-Threading enabled by default. Intel® Hyper-Threading Technology is a term that describes simultaneous multithreading (SMT). Hyper-Threading Technology splits each physical core into two virtual processors. Hyper-Threading Technology is like taking a wide road with a single lane and making it into two relatively narrower lanes. The two-lane highway provides better service over the single-lane road if traffic is moving slow and fast. Hyper-Threading Technology provides better application performance for File I/O, Network I/O, and other slower operations mixed with CPU-intensive operations. The performance advantage of Hyper-Threading Technology typically ranges in the range 0 - 30% over a single-thread mode. Some applications might also see a drop in performance.

If you want to disable Intel® Hyper-Threading, see Disabling Intel Hyper-Threading Technology.

Next steps

After you choose a profile, you're ready to create an instance.

• Creating an instance by using the UI
• Creating an instance by using the CLI
• Creating an instance by using the API
• Creating an instance by using Terraform
• Managing GPUs