Cloud Compute FAQ

General

What is Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Compute?

Oracle Could Infrastructure Compute is a web service that provides bare metal and virtual machine (VM) compute capacity that delivers performance, flexibility, and control without compromise. It's powered by Oracle’s next generation internet-scale infrastructure service and is designed to help modern enterprises do more while paying less when developing and running their most demanding applications and workloads in the cloud.

What can I do with Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Compute?

Compute enables you to provision compute capacity in minutes through an easy-to-use web console. The bare metal compute instance, once provisioned, provides you access to the host. This gives you the flexibility, control, and performance without compromise needed for your most demanding applications and workloads, all while paying only for what you use.

What are regions, availability domains, and fault domains?

Oracle Cloud Infrastructure is hosted in regions, each of which contain at least three availability domains. A region is simply a geographic area, such as “Germany” or “US West.” An availability domain is an isolated, fault-tolerant set of resources consisting of at least one data center. Availability domains don't share infrastructure such as a building, power, or cooling. A failure in one availability domain is unlikely to impact the availability of other availability domains.

A fault domain is a grouping of hardware and infrastructure within an availability domain. Fault domains let you distribute your instances so they're not on the same physical hardware within a single availability domain, thereby introducing another layer of fault tolerance. Each availability domain contains three fault domains. A hardware failure or maintenance on Compute hardware that affects one fault domain doesn't affect instances in other fault domains.

What are Oracle Cloud Infrastructure’s compute offerings?

Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Compute offers the choice, flexibility, control, and performance that your applications and workloads need. You can provision compute instances in minutes through an easy-to-use web console or through an API. Oracle Cloud Infrastructure provides bare metal, virtual machine (VM), and GPU instances:

• Bare metal instances: A bare metal compute instance is a physical server that is fully dedicated to you. It helps address compliance requirements and saves money by leveraging server licenses that you already own, subject to your existing licensing terms. It provides uncompromising raw performance and includes instances with the latest generation NVMe SSDs. These instances offer over a million IOPS and are ideal for running any I/O-intensive application or big data workload. Bare metal compute instances run only the software that you choose, providing you with complete control. There is no Oracle applied software on your instance.
• VM instances: A VM compute instance is an isolated OS environment on a multitenant host. You can provision VM and bare metal instances in your virtual cloud network (VCN) side-by-side and manage them using the same console and API. VM compute instances offer a variety of shapes that let you tailor your deployment to a broad range of application and workload needs. This includes Dense I/O VMs that provide a high-performance instance type with large local non-volatile memory express (NVMe) SSD storage.
• GPU instances: GPU compute instances are available as either VMs or bare metal instances and can be deployed in your VCN side-by-side with others, and managed with the same console and API. They contain NVIDIA GPUs and are suitable for a GPU enabled and CUDA workloads. GPU compute instances offer a variety of shapes that let you tailor your deployment to your workload needs.
• HPC instances: HPC compute instances are available as bare metal instances and can be deployed in your VCN side-by-side with others, and managed with the same console and API. They contain high clock rate CPUs and are suitable for a variety of high-performance computing (HPC) workloads.

How long does it take to create an instance?

Compute instances, regardless of shape or size, launch within minutes from the time that you provision them from the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Console or issue the LaunchInstanceRequest API command.

How do I access my instance after it has launched?

You can remotely connect to your instance by using the industry standard secure shell (SSH) protocol with a public-private key pair for authentication for Linux instances. For Windows instances, you can use the Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) client with a username and password.

Can I configure a custom startup script to execute when my instance starts?

Yes. You can run a custom startup script as part of the provisioning workflow by including it in the user_data key/value pair of the metadata attribute in the LaunchInstanceDetails object. For more information, see the LaunchInstanceDetails API documentation.

Can I stop my instance without deleting or terminating it?

Yes. You can stop your instance without deleting it. The Compute service supports the following actions for an instance:

• Stop: Shuts down the instance.
• Reboot: Restarts the instance (issuing an ACPI reboot).
• Terminate: Shuts down the instance and releases the compute resources. This action can't be reversed. You can keep the instance's boot volume for later reuse. If you choose not to keep the boot volume, it's deallocated and wiped out. Data on the local NVMe SSDs (for storage-optimized instances) is securely wiped.

For billing information, see How am I billed for instances?

How do I pay for the resources that I consume?

Customers can consume Oracle Cloud Infrastructure resources without any upfront commitment and pay only for what they use by creating an account at shop.oracle.com. Alternatively, existing customers can contact their sales representative to enable an existing pool of credits, or purchase a new pool, to consume Oracle Cloud Infrastructure resources based on published metered rates.

How do I monitor the health of my instances?

Oracle Cloud Infrastructure provides you with flexibility, access, and control over your compute instances. You can use a variety of monitoring tools, such as Microsoft SysInternals (sysmon, diskmon, process monitor) and Linux monitoring tools (sysstats, vmstate, iostate), or enterprise management tools such as Oracle Enterprise Manager, to monitor the health of your compute instances. For more information, see the Oracle Enterprise Manager documentation.

How do I get started with Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Compute?

You can access Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Compute via the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Console, REST API, or SDKs. Oracle customers can consume all resources with no upfront commitment and pay only for what they use by creating an account at shop.oracle.com. Alternatively, customers can contact their sales representative to enable an existing pool of credits, or purchase a new pool, and start consuming Oracle Cloud Infrastructure resources based on published metered rates.

After your account is provisioned, see the Getting Started Guide in the service documentation for more information. We have provided a tutorial guiding you through the steps to launch your first instance.

What upgrade options are recommended for prior generation instances?

Oracle Cloud Infrastructure will continue to support customers running prior-generation compute instances. However, as we continue to release new instances types, we encourage customers to use the latest offerings to ensure the best performance and pricing. To review prior-generation instances and upgrade recommendations, see the following list.

Bare Metal High I/O (BM.HighIO1.36)

For customers using the BM.HighIO bare metal shape, we recommend upgrading to X7-based Dense I/O virtual machine instances. The X7-based VM.DenseIO2.16 shape offers the newer Intel Skylake processor, including 16 OCPUs, 240 GB of RAM, and 12.8 TB of NVMe storage at a lower price. Additionally, the X7-based VM.DenseIO2.16 shape offers higher network bandwidth. For details, see Compute Shapes in the service documentation. Customers with CPU-intensive workloads can also opt for a higher-CPU offering with the VM.DenseIO2.24 shape, which includes 24 OCPUs, 320 GB of RAM, and 25.6 TB of NVMe storage.

"X5" Series Compute Instance Shapes

How am I billed for instances?

Billing depends on the shape that you used to create the instance, and the status of the instance.

• Standard shapes: Stopping an instance pauses billing.
• Dense I/O, GPU, and HPC shapes: For most shapes, billing continues for stopped instances because the attached GPU and NVMe local storage resources are preserved. To halt billing, you must terminate the instance. For shapes in the VM.GPU.GU1 series (also named the VM.GPU.A10 series), billing is paused for stopped instances.

Refer to the Compute Pricing page for more information. For information about dedicated virtual machine hosts and Microsoft Windows Server images and how they are billed when they are stopped, see the sections about Microsoft Windows Server OS and Dedicated Virtual Machine Hosts in this FAQ.

Autoscaling

What is autoscaling?

Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Compute's autoscaling capability enables you to automatically scale Compute instances for a workload in response to changing performance metrics, instead of manually calling the Compute APIs or using a Terraform script. A guided Console experience and autoscaling APIs help you create autoscaling policies that automatically launch or terminate instances based on metrics emitted by instances in instance pools. As load increases, new instances are dynamically provisioned. And as load decreases, instances are automatically removed.

This capability is available at no additional cost for virtual machine (VM) instances in commercial regions.

How does autoscaling work?

Autoscaling acts on instance pools and relies on performance metrics that are collected by the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Monitoring service. Instance pools allow you to group VM instances together and keep all VM instances in your pool healthy and running. Monitoring lets you capture average CPU and memory utilization metrics from instances in your instance pools.

With autoscaling, you configure thresholds on the aggregate metrics that Monitoring captures from instances in your instance pool. Autoscaling events are triggered when the thresholds are met or exceeded based on your autoscaling policy and rules. Autoscaling responds to a trigger by adding or removing instances from your instance pools. Autoscaling works by changing the size of your instance pool: instance pools are self-managing and will terminate or launch new instances until the pool reaches the target size.

You need to first launch an instance pool using an initial size, and then define an autoscaling configuration for the instance pool. When you define an autoscaling configuration, it sets up Monitoring such that metrics can start flowing from your instances into Monitoring. Monitoring then averages the metrics and sends back the averaged metrics to autoscaling, which triggers events and starts scaling based on the thresholds you set.

What is an autoscaling configuration?

An autoscaling configuration defines the information that is needed to configure autoscaling for an instance pool. It contains an autoscaling policy with scaling rules. It also defines a cooldown period between scaling events.

Each instance pool can have one autoscaling configuration.

What is an autoscaling policy?

An autoscaling policy defines the minimum and the maximum number of instances to scale to and the initial size of the instance pool. It also defines the autoscaling policy type. Each autoscaling policy also contains two autoscaling rules, one rule for scaling in and another rule for scaling out.

You can apply the following types of autoscaling to an instance pool:

• Metric-based autoscaling: An autoscaling action is triggered when a performance metric meets or exceeds a threshold.
• Schedule-based autoscaling: Autoscaling events take place at the specific times that you schedule.

Autoscaling is supported for virtual machine (VM) and bare metal instance pools that use Standard, DenseIO, and GPU shapes.

What is an autoscaling rule?

An autoscaling rule defines which metric to use for scaling and the thresholds for scaling in and out. You choose a single metric that is used for both the scale-in rule and the scale-out rule. You also define the number of instances to add or remove with each scaling action.

Which metrics can I use with autoscaling?

Autoscaling supports the CPU utilization and memory utilization metrics.

In what increments can I add or remove instances?

You can add or remove instances in increments of one, up to the maximum instance pool size of 50.

How quickly can I scale in and scale out my instance pool?

You can scale in and scale out within minutes. You can also control how frequently autoscaling is triggered by adjusting a cooldown period that defines how long to wait between autoscaling actions.

What is a cooldown period?

A cooldown period is the minimum amount of time that autoscaling waits before taking another scaling action. It lets the instance pool stabilize at the updated level. The cooldown period starts after the instance pool reaches the target size from the previous scaling event. The minimum cooldown period is five minutes.

How do instance pools keep instances healthy?

Instance pools monitor the life cycle state of instances. If the number of instances in the running or launching state is below the instance pool size, the instance pool creates more instances. If the number of instances in the running or launching state is less than the target size, the instance pool creates more instances.

What limits do I have with autoscaling?

There are no service limits associated directly with autoscaling. However, instances that are created with autoscaling actions count against your Compute instance limits. When you reach your Compute instance limits, autoscaling is unable to add more instances to your instance pools. See the Service Limits documentation for the default limits for each instance type and instructions on how to request a service limit increase.

How do instance pools work with my load balancer?

You can attach a load balancer working set OCID to your instance pool. After you do this, every time an instance is added to the instance pool, its IP address is also added to the backend set. When the instance reaches a healthy state (the instance is listening on the configured port number), incoming traffic is automatically routed to the new instance. Similarly, every time an instance is removed, the IP address is also removed from the backend set. When removing instances from the load balancer working set, autoscaling waits two minutes before terminating the instance. The two minute delay allows the Load Balancing service to drain connections on the IP address for the instance before the instance is terminated. Any connections that are still active after two minutes are terminated when the instance is shut down.

How do I enable my instances to emit metrics?

If the instance configuration was based on an Oracle-provided image released after November 18, 2018, the OracleCloudAgent that emits metrics and works with Monitoring and autoscaling is already installed. You can also manually build, install, and then enable the agent for your custom images.

Which instance shapes support autoscaling?

We support all VM instance shapes including VM.Standard1, VM.DenseIO1, VM.Standard2, VM.DenseIO2, VM.Standard2.E2, VM.GPU2, and VM.GPU3.

Confidential computing

Are Intel shapes supported for confidential computing?

Currently, we support only AMD shapes.

What shapes are supported for confidential computing?

Virtual Machine Compute	Bare Metal Compute
VM.Standard.E4.Flex	BM.DenseIO.E4.128
VM.Standard.E3.Flex	BM.Standard.E4.128
	BM.Standard.E3.128

Does enabling confidential computing cost the customer anything?

Enabling confidential computing doesn’t incur any extra costs on top of compute instance pricing.

Can I edit my current VM instances to enable the confidential computing feature?

Currently, we support creating only new confidential VM instances.

Bare Metal Instances

What are bare metal instances?

Bare metal instances are on-demand, bare metal compute resources in the cloud. Unlike virtual machine (VM) instances, bare metal instances are entire physical hosts dedicated to a single customer's use with no hypervisor or Oracle applied software installed. You have full control of the bare metal host's resources, which gives you flexibility, control, and performance without compromise. Bare metal compute instances are ideal for your most demanding applications and workloads.

Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Compute offers a variety of instance types. Each instance type provides a different hardware configuration to support a variety of applications and workloads.

How do I know which instance type I should choose?

• Standard instances can be used for a variety of high-performance and compute-intensive workloads, such as web servers, batch processing, ad serving, and distributed analytics.
• Dense I/O instances are configured with 28.8 TB of local NVMe SSD storage and are ideal for extreme transactional workloads that work on large data sets and require low latency and high throughput, such as big data and high-performance computing (HPC) applications.

How many bare metal instances can I create? Is there a limit?

See the Service Limits help documentation for the default limits for each instance type and instructions on how to request a service limit increase. We are happy to increase the limits for your account as needed.

Can I change or migrate my bare metal instance after it is created?

Currently, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure doesn't provide built-in capability to migrate a bare metal instance to a different bare metal instance type or virtual machine (VM) shape. However, you can perform the migration manually by launching a new compute instance from a boot image that you created (by using the Create Image feature) and subsequently attaching your block volumes to the new instance. If you have data persisted locally, you must copy or replicate the local data manually to the new instance. You can also mitigate changing the shape or scaling for an instance via boot volumes. When you terminate an instance, you can keep its boot volume and launch a new instance with a different shape by using the boot volume that you kept from the original instance.

Can I install my own hypervisors?

Yes. Bare metal instances are dedicated physical hosts with no hypervisor installed on them. You have access to the host and can install your own type 2 hypervisor (hosted hypervisor) such as KVM or VirtualBox to run any version of OS supported by the hypervisors, subject to your existing licensing terms.

Dedicated Virtual Machine Hosts

What are Dedicated Virtual Machine Hosts (DVH)?

Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Compute dedicated virtual machine hosts enable you to run VM compute instances on a physical server that is dedicated to your Oracle Cloud Infrastructure tenancy. No VMs from any other tenancy or Oracle customer will run on this dedicated host. You can then set an optional parameter when launching a VM compute instance to place it on your Dedicated Virtual Machine Host. These dedicated hosts are "single tenant" - i.e., dedicated exclusively to your tenancy. VM characteristics, such as number of OCPUs and amount of memory, and performance are the same as when running on regular shared hardware in Oracle Cloud Infrastructure.

What shape choices do I have with DVHs.?

Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Compute DVH is currently offered in a DVH.Standard2.52 shape. This shape allows you to launch any VM.Standard2 instance on the DVH. New DVH shapes will be added over time.

How am I charged for the Dedicated Virtual Machine Host and VM instances i run on it?

You are charged for the dedicated virtual machine host when it is in the running state. You are not charged for the individual compute VM instances launched on the host, however, you will still be charged per OCPU hour for a Windows Server license when you run a VM instance using a Windows Server image. Billing stops when you terminate the dedicated host. For the DVH.Standard2.52 host, you are charged for a 52 OCPU BM.Standard2.52 instance once the dedicated virtual machine host starts running. On your bill, you will see a charge for 52 OCPUs under "Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Compute Bare Metal Standard - X7". You can at maximum use 48 OCPUs for running your VMs in a DVH.Standard2.52.

What actions are you allowed to perform on the dedicated virtual machine host?

The only supported actions with a dedicated virtual machine host are to launch, move compartments and terminate. However, you are not allowed to terminate the dedicated virtual machine host if there are VM instances still running on it. You are required to terminate all VM instances before you can terminate the dedicated virtual machine host.

Extended Memory VMs

Are OCI Compute extended memory VM shapes available in all regions/realms?

At general availability (GA), extended memory VM shapes will be rolled out over a couple of weeks to all regions in OC1.

Is extended memory VM available in the Free Tier?

No, extended memory VM isn’t part of the Free Tier.

On which shapes is extended memory VM available?

It’s available on VM.Standard.E4.Flex, VM.Standard.E3.Flex, and VM.Standard3.Flex.

Does extended memory VM have a different pricing structure? Or ordering process?

No, the pricing is the same as the supported shapes, and the SKUs are the same. There are no new SKUs. In the pricing and SLA (PDF) documents, these shapes are referred to as Standard-E4, Standard-E3, and Standard-X7/X9.

What is the key functionality of extended memory VM?

Extended memory VMs can be configured with OCPUs and memory from across the physical processor's socket boundary.

What is the range of OCPUs for extended memory VM?

For VM.Standard.E4.Flex and VM.Standard.E3.Flex, the range of OCPUs that can be configured on the VM is 1 OCPU to 114 OCPUs. For VM.Standard3.Flex, that range is 1 OCPU to 56 OCPUs.

What is the range of memory that can be configured on extended memory VM?

For VM.Standard.E4.Flex and VM.Standard.E3.Flex, the range of memory that can be configured on the VM is 1 GB to 1,760 GB. For VM.Standard3.Flex, that range is 1 GB to 896 GB.

What is the maximum network bandwidth available for extended memory VM?

For a fully configured extended memory VM, the maximum bandwidth available is 40 Gb/sec on VM.Standard.E4.Flex and VM.Standard.E3.Flex. For VM.Standard3.Flex, the maximum bandwidth is 32 Gb/sec.

For those who were in the limited availability (LA) program for extended memory VM, do we have to reboot or do anything to continue using the product?

No, there’s no reboot required. You don’t need to rebuild the VM for GA.

Can a standard VM be edited to be resized and reconfigured as extended memory VM?

Yes, using the edit shape on the current VM, you can reconfigure and resize to extended memory VM.

Does extended memory VM have different service limits than standard VMs?

No, the service limits for standard VMs apply to extended memory VMs.

Does the extended memory VM limit have an identical SLA and service level objective as standard VMs?

Yes, the same SLA for standard VMs also applies to extended memory VM.

Linux OS

How can I upgrade or apply patches to my Linux OS instances without downtime?

Oracle Cloud Infrastructure compute instances running Oracle Linux come included with Oracle Ksplice. Ksplice is an OS-management technology that lets you update important kernel and user-space security components without requiring a reboot.

For more information about downloading patches to your OS instance, see Oracle Ksplice.

Can I create an image of a Linux OS and use it to launch a new compute instance?

Yes. You can create a custom image of your boot disk as a backup or use it as a mechanism to package your preconfigured OS image and use it to launch new compute instances. This is particularly useful when you need to create multiple compute instances with similar configurations. The custom image is instance-type and shape agnostic; it can be used to launch any instance types or shapes: bare metal or virtual machine instances.

After you initiate image creation, the system stops your compute instance to ensure a consistent boot disk image. The time it takes for the image creation process depends on the size of the boot disk. After the image creation is complete, the compute instance automatically restarts. For applications and services that don't automatically start when the instance reboots, you're expected to restart them manually.

Microsoft Windows Server OS

How often does Oracle Cloud Infrastructure change Microsoft Windows license price?

On April 25, 2020, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure changed the pricing of Windows licenses to $0.092 per OCPU/hr. The new price is consistent with Windows pricing across cloud providers. Oracle Cloud Infrastructure sets the price of third-party software licenses based on the cost of licenses from the third-party software provider.

What versions and editions of Microsoft Windows Server are available on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure?

Microsoft Windows Server is available as an Oracle-provided platform image and is also supported for custom image import. The following versions and editions of Microsoft Windows Server are supported:

• Windows Server 2019 Standard, Datacenter
• Windows Server 2016 Standard, Datacenter
• Windows Server 2012 R2 Standard, Datacenter
• Windows Server 2012 Standard, Datacenter

Platform images are available in the English language. Refer to the documentation about platform images and windows BYOI.

How will I be charged for running Microsoft Windows Server on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure?

The cost of a Microsoft Windows Server license is an additional cost, on top of the underlying compute instance price. Billing depends on the status and shape of the instance. The Windows Server license charge starts when the instance is in the "running" state and ends when you terminate the instance.

For Standard VM and bare metal instances, when the instance is in a "stopped" state, billing pauses for both the compute instance cost and the Microsoft Windows Server operating system license cost.

For most Dense I/O, GPU, and HPC shapes, billing continues for both the compute instance and the Windows Server license when the instance is stopped because the attached GPU and NVMe local storage resources are preserved. To halt billing, you must terminate the instance. For shapes in the VM.GPU.GU1 series (also named the VM.GPU.A10 series), billing is paused for stopped instances.

You can get more information about Microsoft Windows Server pricing from the Compute Pricing page.

How does Microsoft Windows Server get updated with the latest patches?

Oracle Cloud Infrastructure enables automatic updates on Microsoft Windows Server and uses the default settings for applying Windows patches. You need to update your VCN security list to enable egress traffic for port 80 (http) and port 443 (https) to install patches from Microsoft Windows Update Servers.

Can I create a custom image of my Microsoft Windows Server and use it to launch a new compute instance?

Yes. You can create a custom image of your Windows Server instance and use it to launch a new compute instance. We support the creation of "generalized" images (used to create a template or golden image) and "specialized" images (used as backup) for your Windows instance. For more information about these image types, see Creating Windows Custom Images help documentation.

Can I bring my own license for Microsoft software to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure?

Yes. You can bring your own license (BYOL) for Microsoft Windows Server on a dedicated bare metal or dedicated virtual machine host, subject to the Microsoft Product Terms. You are responsible for managing your own licenses to maintain compliance with Microsoft licensing terms. For more information, see Licensing Options for Microsoft Windows.

The following table shows the BYOL requirements for Microsoft licenses on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure.

Application licenses such as SQL Server or System Center require License Mobility through Software Assurance when running on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure VM instances. License Mobility is not used for Microsoft Office, Windows clients, or Windows Server BYOL. Review the Microsoft Product Terms to validate which applications support License Mobility.

Direct questions about your licensing rights to Microsoft or your Microsoft reseller.

Can I bring my own Windows Server license and use an Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Windows OS image?

No. You must bring your own Microsoft Windows image if you bring your Microsoft Windows Server license on a dedicated Bare Metal Machine and Dedicated Virtual Machine Hosts host only. BYOL of Microsoft Windows Server license is not permitted for Virtual Machines on a multi-tenant host.

What is the support model for Microsoft Software (Windows and others) on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure?

Oracle Support provides limited assistance for Microsoft Windows Server operating systems running on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure and for SQL Server images provided by Oracle Cloud Marketplace. For product issues, work directly with Microsoft Support. You can get more information about support options for Microsoft software.

Operating System (OS) Images

What OS images do you provide and support?

We provide images with a variety of Linux distributions such as Oracle Linux, CentOS, and Ubuntu, as well as Microsoft Windows Server. For a complete list and more details, see Oracle-Provided Images help documentation. We support Oracle Linux OSs with Oracle Linux Premier Support included at no additional charge with Oracle Cloud Infrastructure.

Which compute shapes can be used with the different OSs?

You can launch any of the supported OSs on any Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Compute bare metal or virtual machine compute instance shape. You can see a list of all available shapes on the Compute Pricing page.

Can I bring my own OS image?

Yes. Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Compute supports bringing your own OS image. For more information, see Bring Your Own Image help documentation.

Oracle Cloud VMware Solution

What is Oracle Cloud VMware Solution?

Oracle Cloud VMware Solution is based on VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) and provides a fully supported, customizable cloud environment for VMware deployments and migrations. The solution delivers a full-stack software-defined data center (SDDC), including VMware’s vCenter, ESXi, NSX, and vSAN. Specific use cases targeted by Oracle Cloud VMware Solution include data center and application migration, hybrid extension, on-demand capacity, and disaster recovery.

In which regions is Oracle Cloud VMware Solution available?

Oracle Cloud VMware Solution is available in all Oracle Cloud regions.

Is Oracle Cloud VMware Solution a managed VMware service?

Oracle Cloud VMware Solution is a customer-managed solution that provides a native VMware cloud environment on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI), which is highly secure, highly performing, and globally available.

For more information about supported compute shapes, please refer to the other FAQ page.

Oracle Images

Can I launch prebuilt images for Oracle solutions?

Yes. From the Create Compute Instance wizard, you can launch prebuilt Oracle enterprise images and solutions that are enabled for Oracle Cloud Infrastructure.

Does the Oracle application installed on the image require a license?

Depending on the Oracle application, there are 30-day evaluation trial terms. At the end of the trial term, a license is required to continue use. Any trial information is detailed in the preinstallation notes in the image selection.

Storage

What are my Oracle Cloud Infrastructure storage options?

Oracle Cloud Infrastructure provides the following storage options to support different use cases:

• Local storage: Local NVMe-based SSD storage with very high IOPS and low latency is available for the storage-optimized instance type (that is, BM.DenseIO1.36).
• Block volumes: Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Block Volumes provides persistent block storage volumes that can be attached to a compute instance and used like a normal file system for the OS.
• Object storage: Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Object Storage provides highly durable storage for objects such as images, videos, and other unstructured data. Object storage is replicated across availability domains within a region to ensure availability and durability.

What are the IOPS and latency metrics for local NVMe SSD drives?

Local NVMe SSDs provide very high performance storage and are ideal for the most demanding workloads. For more information about NVMe SSD performance, see the product specification.

What happens to my data when I terminate my instance?

After you terminate your compute instance, you have the option to keep its boot volume for later reuse. If you choose not to keep the boot volume, it's deallocated and wiped out. Local NVMe storage for storage-optimized instances is wiped out and deallocated. Any data in the block volumes attached to the instance persists and remains available for later use.

Before terminating the instance, you can create a custom image of the boot disk and use the custom image to launch new instances at a later time.

Trusted Third-Party Partner Images

Where can I launch partner images from?

All third-party images are accessible in the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Console via the embedded Marketplace. Choose the partner image that you want to launch, and you are guided through the Launch Instance process.

Who do I contact for technical support related to the images provided by Oracle partners?

After the partner image is installed, any product issues related to the image are addressed by the partner. For support issues related to installing images, submit a ticket in My Oracle Support.

Virtual Machine (VM) Instances

What are virtual machines (VMs)?

Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Compute VMs offer smaller compute shapes than bare metal instances. VMs use the same cloud-optimized hardware and networking infrastructure as bare metal instances to deliver compute shape flexibility and performance for your changing application needs.

What shape choices do I have with VMs?

Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Compute offers flexible VM instances where you can configure the memory and CPU of your instance to meet the varying needs of the applications that you build. Standard E3 based flexible VM instances support between 1 and 64 cores and between 1 and 64 GB RAM per core (up to a maximum of 1024 GB).

You can also choose fixed shapes with a range of options including Intel and AMD processors, NVMe local SSD storage, and GPUs. For details, see the Compute Shapes page.

How many VM instances can I create? Is there a limit?

See the Service Limits help documentation for the default limits and instructions on how to request a service limit increase. We are happy to increase the limits for your account as needed.

How do I choose among the different VM shapes?

Each VM shape has a different number of processor cores, amount of memory, and disk configuration, so you can easily select a size that matches the needs of your application.

There are three types of VM shapes.

• Standard VM compute shapes are great for general-purpose workloads, providing a balance of cores, memory, and network resources.
• DenseIO VM compute shapes are better suited for resource-intensive workloads, such as large databases, and big data applications like Apache Spark and Hadoop.
• GPU VM compute shapes are specialized shapes for rendering, scientific computation, and machine learning workloads.

Can I change the shape or migrate my VM after it is created?

You can use the compute Console, API or CLI to change the shape of a VM after it's created. You can choose any VM shape that is compatible with the existing operating system image. The shape change will require a reboot but will preserve all instance properties. See the technical documentation for more information about how to change the shape of an instance.

You can also migrate your VM manually by launching a new compute instance from a boot image that you created (by using the Create Image feature) and subsequently attaching your block volumes to the new instance. If you have data persisted locally, you must copy or replicate the local data manually to the new instance.

Feedback and Support

Where can I send feedback or get support?

Oracle Cloud Infrastructure provides several options for sending feedback or getting support from the community and from Oracle. You can find vibrant and active community support in the Oracle Forum and regular updates via the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Blog.

You can also get support for debugging and troubleshooting by submitting a service request via My Oracle Support.