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.
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.
Number of vCPUs | Max volumes | Max vNICs |
---|---|---|
2 - 4 | 15 | 1 |
8+ | 15 | 2 |