Right-Size Your VM Instances to Support Your Workload

Your business is constantly changing. Sometimes, it’s cyclical—for example, tied to a financial or retail calendar. But often, it’s dynamic and unpredictable. As your workload changes, you need to be able to quickly scale up your compute resources to increase performance and to scale down to reduce cost. Now, you can change the CPU, memory, and network bandwidth of your existing virtual machine (VM) instances in Oracle Cloud Infrastructure without rebuilding your instances or redeploying your applications.

Right-Sizing Made Easy

When you launch a VM instance, you specify a shape (or template) that determines the number of OCPUs, the amount of memory, and the network bandwidth for your workload. Until now, you had to choose a shape with enough room to support your anticipated future performance needs. If your business grew faster than expected, your only option was to launch a new instance and reconfigure your applications on the new instance. Now, you can change the shape of an existing instance with a single reboot while preserving your applications and the instance properties.

Expecting a surge in usage? With just a couple of clicks, you can reconfigure your VM instances to scale up to a configuration with better performance. And it's just as easy to move to a more cost-efficient configuration after the demand has passed. You can pick the shape with the number of OCPUs, the amount of memory, and the network bandwidth you need. You can also change the shape of your instance to take advantage of the latest Intel and AMD processors.

The shape-change process requires a reboot, but it doesn’t affect the block volumes, VNICs, or other instance properties, like ephemeral and reserved public IP addresses. You don’t have to reconfigure or reinstall your applications to take advantage of the increased OCPU, memory, and network bandwidth that are available with the new shape.

Changing a VM Instance Shape

In the Console, open the details page for the instance that you want to resize. Click Actions, and then click Change Shape.

The shape selection panel displays the shapes that are compatible with the current shape and OS image. Select the shape that you want, based on the processor type, OCPUs, memory, and network bandwidth. Then, click Change Shape.

If the instance is running, it’s restarted. If you change the shape of a stopped instance, the shape is changed, but the instance remains stopped.

After the instance restarts, the shape is updated to the specified shape, and the instance properties and attachments remain unaffected. Now, you can take advantage of the updated VM resources for your workload.

With the API or other developer tools, use the UpdateInstance operation to change the VM shape.

The change shape feature is available in all regions and is supported for VM Standard and VM GPU3 instances. The processor and operating system image of the original shape determine which shapes you can select as a target for the new shape.

When you change the shape, you are billed based on the usage of the new shape. Depending on your application licensing requirements, you might also incur extra costs if you increase the number of OCPUs of your VM.

See the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure documentation for more information about how to change the shape of an instance and a list of Compute VM shapes.

We want you to experience these new features and all the enterprise-grade capabilities that Oracle Cloud Infrastructure offers. It’s easy to try them out with US$300 free credit. For more information, see the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Getting Started guide, Compute service overview, and FAQ.