Compute Shapes

A flexible shape is a shape that lets you customize the number of OCPUs and the amount of memory when launching or resizing your VM. When you create a VM instance using the flexible shape, you select the number of OCPUs and the amount of memory that you need for the workloads that run on the instance. The network bandwidth and number of VNICs scale proportionately with the number of OCPUs. This flexibility lets you build VMs that match your workload, enabling you to optimize performance and minimize cost.

Currently, flexible memory is available on VM.Standard.E3.Flex instances that run on AMD Rome processors. For this VM and processor combination, you can select from 1 to 64 OCPUs. The amount of memory allowed is based on the number of OCPUs selected. For each OCPU, you can select up to 64 GB of memory, with a maximum of 1024 GB total. The minimum amount of memory allowed is either 1 GB or a value matching the number of OCPUs, whichever is greater. For example, if you select 25 OCPUs, the minimum amount of memory allowed is 25 GB.

These resources are billed at a per-second granularity with a one-minute minimum. Optimize your costs by choosing the shape that matches your workload and by changing the shape when your workload changes. For example, you can configure the VM to maximize compute processing power by choosing a low core-to-memory ratio. Or, for applications like in-memory databases or big data processing engines, configure an instance with a high core-to-memory ratio. Modify the OCPUs and memory as your workload changes, scaling up to increase performance or scaling down to reduce costs.

The VM.Standard.E3.Flex shape, a VM standard shape, is a flexible shape.

The following shapes are available for bare metal instances:

• Standard Shapes
• Dense I/O Shapes
• GPU Shapes
• HPC Shapes

Network bandwidth is based on expected bandwidth for traffic within a VCN. To determine which physical NICs are active for a shape, refer to the network bandwidth specifications in the following tables. If the network bandwidth is listed as "2 x <bandwidth> Gbps," it means that both NIC 0 and NIC 1 are active.

The following shapes are available for VMs:

• Standard Shapes
• Dense I/O Shapes
• GPU Shapes

Network bandwidth is based on expected bandwidth for traffic within a VCN.

Oracle Cloud Infrastructure periodically releases new generations of Compute shapes. The latest shapes let you take advantage of newer hardware and a better price-performance ratio. When a shape is several years old, and newer generation shapes that are suited for the same purposes are available, the old shape transitions to become a previous generation shape.

Previous generation shapes are still fully supported. However, because the underlying hardware has reached the sustaining phase of its lifecycle, capacity in certain high-demand regions might be limited.

If you're using a previous generation shape, we encourage you to upgrade to a current generation shape.

To upgrade from a previous generation shape to a current generation shape, you can do the following things:

• For supported VM instances, change the shape of the instance.
• For bare metal instances and VM instances that don't support changing the shape, terminate the instance but DO NOT delete the boot volume. Then, use the boot volume to create a new instance.