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.

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

See the following table to see the available profile configurations.

Table 2. Profile families
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
bx2-metal-192x768	192	768	960 GB	100
bx2d-metal-192x768	192	768	960 GB 51.2 TB secondary storage (allocation of 16 x 3200)	100

Table 2. Profile families
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
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
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

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).
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 amount of vCPUs and the amount of memory (GB). For example, 192x768 means that this profile has 192 vCPUs and 768 GiB of memory.

Using “bx2d-metal-192x768” as an example, it's a Balanced bare metal profile with 192 vCPUs and 768 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 192 vCPU = 96 physical cores).

Profile availability by region

See the following table to see what 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	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 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	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 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	jp-tok-2
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.