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General purpose - Flex (beta)

General purpose - Flex (beta)

Beta

Flex profiles are a beta feature and are available for evaluation and testing purposes. Contact IBM support if you're interested in getting access.

The general purpose flex virtual server profiles (nano, balanced, compute, and memory) are built atop the 2nd and 4th Generation Intel® Xeon® Scalable processors and AMD’s 3rd generation EPYC processors. You can place Flex profiles on any available generation of these processors in a specified region.

Flex profiles offer a broad set of capabilities and scale from 2 vCPUs (1 physical core) up to 64 vCPUs (64 physical cores).

Virtual servers with a flex profile are configured with a baseline CPU family regardless of hypervisor host CPU family.

Hardware placement is random. You can't select hardware or CPU family. The hardware that is selected is based on hardware availability.

Operating systems

Flex profiles support the following operating systems.

  • Linux
  • Windows

Processor generation

  • Intel 2nd Generation Xeon® Gold 6248 and Platinum 8260 Scalable processors
  • Intel 4th Generation Xeon® 8474C Scalable processor
  • AMD 3rd generation EPYC 7763 processor

Keep in mind that you don't have control over which hardware that a flex profile provisions.

Availability

  • Status: Beta
  • Regions: All

Features and capabilities

See the following features and capabilities for flex profiles.

Capabilities and limitations

The following list shows the capabilities of flex profiles.

  • Core type: Flex
  • Dedicated host: No
  • Hyperthreading: Yes (SMT-2)
  • Secure boot: No
  • Confidential computing: No
  • TDX: No
  • Live migration: Yes
  • Instance storage: No
  • NUMA Pinning: Yes
  • SAP certified: No
  • LinunONE (s390x): No
  • Counts toward compute quota: Yes
  • Bandwidth pooling: No

Features

The following list shows the supported features of flex profiles.

  • Resizable to and away from flex profiles and between flex profile types
  • Flex profiles can be placed on multiple CPU families, including Intel Cascade Lake, Intel Sapphire Rapids, and AMD Milan.
  • 1 Gbps overall bandwidth per vCPU
  • Reservations
  • Instance templates
  • Autoscale
  • Placement groups
  • Instance metadata
  • Lost node remediation (LNR). LNR is supported according to the server's host failure availability policy (stop or restart)
  • Live migration

VM configuration

See the following list for VM configuration.

  • Hardware type: i440fx
  • Cloud networking: virtio
  • Block boot volume: virtio
  • Exception: vscsi for Windows-based virtual server instances
  • Block data volumes: virtio
  • Instance storage: virtio

Instance profiles

The following flex profiles are available and are subject to change.

Flexible profile options for virtual servers
Instance profile vCPU Memory (GiB) Total instance bandwidth (Gbps)
nxf-2x1 2 1 2
nxf-2x2 2 2 2
bxf-2x8 2 8 2
bxf-4x16 4 16 4
bxf-8x32 8 32 8
bxf-16x64 16 64 16
bxf-24x96 24 96 24
bxf-32x128 32 128 32
bxf-48x192 48 192 48
bxf-64x256 64 256 64
cxf-2x4 2 4 2
cxf-4x8 4 8 4
cxf-8x16 8 16 8
cxf-16x32 16 32 16
cxf-24x48 24 48 24
cxf-32x64 32 64 32
cxf-48x96 48 96 48
cxf-64x128 64 128 64
mxf-2x16 2 16 2
mxf-4x32 4 32 4
mxf-8x64 8 64 8
mxf-16x128 16 128 16
mxf-24x192 24 192 32
mxf-48x384 48 384 48
mxf-64x512 64 512 64

Limits

An instance has a limit for the number of volumes and virtual network interfaces that can be attached. This limit is based on the size of the instance.

Flex profile family limits for for maximum volumes and maximum network interfaces
Number of vCPUs Max volumes Max vNICs
2 - 4 15 1
8+ 15 2