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About dedicated virtual servers

About dedicated virtual servers

The IBM Cloud® infrastructure dedicated host offering is a virtualized, single-tenant, dedicated server. It provides you with maximum control over workload placement and flexible post-provisioning options. You can decide which pre-determined IBM Cloud data center your virtual servers are placed in and can be assured capacity by allocating your hosts directly to your account.

The offering includes the following features:

  • Affinity and anti-affinity. You can specify host-to-virtual server and virtual server-to-virtual server relationships that need to remain, which are known as affinity and anti-affinity rules. These rules help you make sure that your workloads are placed based on your workload requirements.
  • Post-deployment management. You can migrate virtual servers between dedicated hosts based on your workload requirements.
  • Workload visibility. You can view resource consumption—core, RAM, and local storage—for each host, giving you maximum control over your workload management.

You have the choice of two deployment models: dedicated hosts and dedicated instances. Dedicated hosts help with control over workload placement and dedicated instances offer single-tenant isolation.

Dedicated instances do not provide some of the control features offered by dedicated hosts. See the following table for more details.


This table has row and column headers. The row headers identify the control feature. The column headers identify whether the offering offers the control feature. To understand whether the offering offers the control feature, navigate to the row in the table, and find the offering that you are interested in.
Dedicated virtual server feature Dedicated hosts instances Dedicated instances
Single-tenant isolation Checkmark icon Checkmark icon
Virtual server placement control Checkmark icon
Resource visibility Checkmark icon
Instance billing Checkmark icon
Host billing Checkmark icon
Post-deployment control Checkmark icon
Capacity reservations Checkmark icon

Pricing of host is inclusive of core, RAM, Local SSD, and network speeds. Premium operating system (OS), storage area network (SAN) storage, and software add-ons are priced per instance with existing pricing and licensing in an hourly or monthly model.

Keep in mind the following when you’re ordering a dedicated host and dedicated host instance:

  • The size of your host is determined by your workloads that you wnat to run on it. The default is 56 Cores X 242 GB RAM X 1.2 TB, but you can choose from more configurations.
  • You can order only two hosts at a time. For example, if you need six hosts, you need to place three separate orders.
  • Each host needs its own unique name and you can automatically assign your POD.
  • Network speeds up to 20 Gbps are achievable through extra configuration. For more information about network performance, see Configuring virtual server settings for improved network performance.

Next steps

After you reviewed and decided upon your deployment options, it is time to provision your virtual server. To get started, see Provisioning dedicated hosts and instances.