x86-64 bare metal server profiles

When you create a bare metal server, you can select from a profile family that best fits your needs. A profile provides a different combination of hardware configurations that include the number of vCPUs, amount of RAM, and local storage size. The attributes define the size and capabilities of the bare metal server that you provision.

Sapphire Rapids (x3 and x3d) profiles are only available in US South (Dallas).

About profile families

Profiles are grouped by the vCPUs:Memory ratio across all the VPC compute offerings. You can choose from the following profile families:

Table 1. Profile families
Family	vCPU:Memory ratio	Description
Balanced	1:4	Best for midsize databases and common cloud applications with moderate traffic.
Compute	1:2	Best for CPU-intensive demands with moderate to high web traffic, such as production batch processing and front-end web servers.
Memory	1:8 or 1:6	Best for memory intensive workloads, such as large caching workloads, large database applications, or in-memory analytics workloads.
Very High Memory	1:16	Best for running small to medium in-memory databases and OLAP workloads, such as SAP BW/4 HANA.

Very High Memory profiles are available for customers with special approval. Contact your IBM Sales representative if you are interested in getting access.

Profile configurations

Profiles contained either the Cascade Lake current generation of Cascade Lake processors (x2 and x2d) or the Sapphire Rapids processors (x3 and x3d). See the following tables to see the available profile configurations.

Table 2. Profile families for x2 and x2d
Use the buttons before the table to change the context of the table. The column headers identify the hardware class.
Name	vCPU	Memory (GiB)	Local storage	Total network bandwidth (Gbps)
bx2-metal-96x384	96	384	960 GB	100
bx2d-metal-96x384	96	384	960 GB 25.6 TB secondary storage (allocation of 8 x 3200)	100

Table 2. Profile families for x2 and x2d
Use the buttons before the table to change the context of the table. The column headers identify the hardware class.
Name	vCPU	Memory (GiB)	Local storage	Total network bandwidth (Gbps)
cx2-metal-96x192	96	192	960 GB	100
cx2d-metal-96x192	96	192	960 GB 25.6 TB secondary storage (allocation of 8 x 3200)	100

Table 2. Profile families for x2 and x2d
Use the buttons before the table to change the context of the table. The column headers identify the hardware class.
Name	vCPU	Memory (GiB)	Local storage	Total network bandwidth (Gbps)
mx2-metal-96x768	96	768	960 GB	100
mx2d-metal-96x768	96	768	960 GB 25.6 TB secondary storage (allocation of 8 x 3200)	100

Table 2. Profile families for x2 and x2d
Use the buttons before the table to change the context of the table. The column headers identify the hardware class.
Name	vCPU	Memory (GiB)	Local storage	Total network bandwidth (Gbps)
vx2d-metal-96x1536	96	1536	960 GB 25.6 TB secondary storage (allocation of 8 x 3200)	100

The 960 GB of available local storage is composed of 2 960 GB SSDs in RAID1 for redundancy.

Table 3. Profile families for x3 and x3d
Use the buttons before the table to change the context of the table. The column headers identify the hardware class.
Name	vCPU	Memory (GiB)	Local storage	Total network bandwidth (Gbps)
bx3-metal-48x256	48	256	480	100
bx3d-metal-48x256	48	256	4x7600	100
bx3-metal-64x256	64	256	480	100
bx3d-metal-64x256	64	256	4x7600	100
bx3d-metal-192x1024	192	1024	8x7600	100

Table 3. Profile families for x3 and x3d
Use the buttons before the table to change the context of the table. The column headers identify the hardware class.
Name	vCPU	Memory (GiB)	Local storage	Total network bandwidth (Gbps)
cx3-metal-48x128	48	128	480	100
cx3d-metal-48x128	48	128	4x7600	100
cx3-metal-64x128	64	128	480	100
cx3d-metal-64x128	64	128	4x7600	100

Table 3. Profile families for x3 and x3d
Use the buttons before the table to change the context of the table. The column headers identify the hardware class.
Name	vCPU	Memory (GiB)	Local storage	Total network bandwidth (Gbps)
mx3-metal-16x128	16	128	480 GB	100
mx3d-metal-16x128	16	128	4x7600 GB	100
mx3-metal-48x512	48	512	480 GB	100
mx3d-metal-48x512	48	512	4x7600 GB	100
mx3-metal-64x512	64	512	480 GB	100
mx3d-metal-64x512	64	512	4x7600 GB	100
mx3d-metal-96x1024	96	1024	4x7600 GB	100
mx3d-metal-128x1024	128	1024	4x7600 GB	100

Table 3. Profile families for x3 and x3d
Use the buttons before the table to change the context of the table. The column headers identify the hardware class.
Name	vCPU	Memory (GiB)	Local storage	Total network bandwidth (Gbps)
vx3-metal-16x256	16	256	1x480	100
vx3d-metal-16x256	16	256	1x480, 4x7600	100

Table 3. Profile families for x3 and x3d
Use the buttons before the table to change the context of the table. The column headers identify the hardware class.
Name	vCPU	Memory (GiB)	Local storage	Total network bandwidth (Gbps)
ux3-metal-16x512	16	512	480	100
ux3d-metal-16x512	16	512	1x480, 4x7600	100

The 480 GB of available local storage is composed of 2 480 GB SSDs in RAID1 for redundancy.

Understanding the naming rule of the profiles

The following information describes the naming rule of the profiles.

b represents Balanced family profile - c represents the Compute family profile - m represents the Memory family profile - v represents the Very High Memory family profile.
x represents the x86_64 CPU architecture.
2 represents the current generation of processors (Cascade Lake).
3 represents Sapphire Rapids processors.
d represents support for NVMe U.2 SSDs.
"metal" denotes that the profile is a bare metal server.
The last position that contains numbers shows the amount of vCPUs and the amount of memory (GB). For example, 96x384 means that this profile has 96 vCPUs and 384 GiB of memory.

Using “bx2d-metal-96x384” as an example, it's a Balanced bare metal profile with 96 vCPUs and 384 GiB memory, has Cascade Lake processors, and NVMe U.2 SSDs.

Bare metal profiles are dedicated servers that provide physical cores. vCPU measurements are used in profile naming only. vCPU to physical cores are a 2:1 ratio (e.g 96 vCPU = 48 physical cores).

Generation 3 (x3 and x3d) bare metal profiles availability by region

See the following table to see what Generation 3 (x3 and x3d) bare metal profiles are available by region.

Table 3. Bare metal profiles availability by region
Use the buttons before the table to change the context of the table. The column headers identify the hardware class.
Profile	us-south-1	us-south-2	us-south-3
mx3-metal-16x128
cx3-metal-48x128
cx3-metal-64x128
mx3d-metal-16x128
cx3d-metal-48x128
cx3d-metal-64x128
vx3-metal-16x256
bx3-metal-48x256
bx3-metal-64x256
vx3d-metal-16x256
bx3d-metal-48x256
bx3d-metal-64x256
ux3-metal-16x512
mx3-metal-48x512
mx3-metal-64x512
ux3d-metal-16x512
mx3d-metal-48x512
mx3d-metal-64x512
mx3d-metal-96x1024
mx3d-metal-128x1024
bx3d-metal-192x1024

Generation 2 (x2 and x2d) bare metal profiles availability by region

See the following table to see what Generation 2 (x2 and x2d) bare metal profiles are available by region.

Table 4. Bare metal profiles availability by region
Use the buttons before the table to change the context of the table. The column headers identify the hardware class.
Profile	us-south-1	us-south-2	us-south-3	us-east-1	us-east-2	ca-tor-2	ca-tor-3
cx2-metal-96x192
cx2d-metal-96x192
bx2-metal-96x384
bx2d-metal-96x384
mx2-metal-96x768
mx2d-metal-96x768
vx2d-metal-96x1536

Table 4. Bare metal profiles availability by region
Use the buttons before the table to change the context of the table. The column headers identify the hardware class.
Profile	eu-de-1	eu-de-2	eu-es-1	eu-es-3	eu-gb-1
cx2-metal-96x192
cx2d-metal-96x192
bx2-metal-96x384
bx2d-metal-96x384
mx2-metal-96x768
mx2d-metal-96x768
vx2d-metal-96x1536

Table 4. Bare metal profiles availability by region
Use the buttons before the table to change the context of the table. The column headers identify the hardware class.
Profile	jp-tok-2	jp-tok-3
cx2-metal-96x192
cx2d-metal-96x192
bx2-metal-96x384
bx2d-metal-96x384
mx2-metal-96x768
mx2d-metal-96x768

Viewing profile configurations

You can view available profile configurations by using the UI, CLI, or the API.

Using the UI to view profiles

Use the following steps to view available bare metal profiles by using the UI.

In the IBM Cloud console, go to Navigation Menu icon > VPC Infrastructure > Compute > Bare metal servers.
From the Bare metal servers for VPC page, click Create.
On the New bare metal server for VPC page, you can view and select profiles under Profile.

Using the CLI to view profiles

Use the following command to list all the bare metal server profiles that are available in a region:

ibmcloud is bare-metal-server-profiles [--output JSON] [-q, --quiet]

Using the API to view profiles

List all bare metal server profiles that are available in a region by running the following API request:

curl -X GET \
"$vpc_api_endpoint/v1/bare_metal_server/profiles?version=2021-03-09&generation=2" \
-H "Authorization: $iam_token"

Next Steps

After you choose a profile, you can create bare metal servers on VPC.