IBM Cloud

Platform

Products

name: Virtual Servers for VPC — public x86 instances; category: self_managed_root_virtual_machine; service model: Hourly, API-first virtual machines inside customer VPCs, with SSH-key or Windows administrative access, stock/custom/catalog images, block boot volumes, lifecycle controls and optional public networking. Public instances run on multi-tenant hosts.; profile families: Balanced, Compute, Memory, Very High Memory, Ultra High Memory, GPU and accelerators, Storage Optimized, Confidential Computing, Flex, High Frequency; pricing options: On-demand hourly usage, configurable Flex CPU shares, Spot capacity and separately offered reservations. The directory benchmarks all four current nxf-1x1 CPU-share choices with a 10 GiB eligible Linux boot volume; it does not use account credit, a reservation or Spot pricing.; hardware: Current Flex capacity can land on Intel 2nd- or 4th-generation Xeon Scalable or AMD EPYC 7763 hosts according to regional availability. The customer cannot select the CPU family for Flex.; new order boundary: Only current x86 profiles are represented as orderable. IBM Cloud LinuxONE, Wazi as a Service, Hyper Protect Virtual Servers for VPC and s390x dedicated hosts stopped accepting new instances on 28 February 2026 and are excluded., name: Virtual Servers for VPC — dedicated hosts; category: single_tenant_hosted_virtual_machine; service model: Customer VPC instances placed on a single-tenant IBM Cloud dedicated host or host group for hardware isolation, workload placement and eligible licensing needs. Host capacity and the guest instances are separate billable resources.; boundary: A dedicated host is a deployment option for VPC VMs, not a bare-metal server exposed as the benchmark offer. Flex Nano profiles do not support dedicated hosts., name: Virtual Servers for VPC — Spot instances; category: interruptible_root_virtual_machine; service model: Discounted spare x86 VPC capacity for interruptible or stateless workloads. IBM can evict a Spot instance at any time, so Spot is documented but excluded from the continuously available benchmark., name: Virtual Servers for Classic — public; category: self_managed_full_admin_multitenant_virtual_machine; service model: Previous-generation Citrix Hypervisor VMs with full root/administrator control, public and private interfaces, SAN or local storage, image templates, hourly postpaid or monthly prepaid billing and configurable profiles.; profile families: Balanced, Balanced Local Storage, Variable Compute, Compute, Memory, GPU; benchmark: C1.1x1 supplies 1 vCPU, 1 GiB RAM and an included minimum 25 GB SAN boot disk. The monthly benchmark includes 250 GB public egress; the hourly benchmark has no included egress allocation.; account boundary: An upgraded account and IBM approval are required before Classic virtual servers can be ordered. Current product and provisioning documentation still supports public hourly/monthly ordering.; deprecation boundary: Classic Reserved virtual servers are not a current product: new purchase ended 31 December 2025 and support ended 31 March 2026. Public, dedicated and transient Classic products remain documented and active., name: Virtual Servers for Classic — dedicated instances and hosts; category: single_tenant_full_admin_virtual_machine; service model: Dedicated instances provide single-tenant isolation; dedicated hosts additionally expose capacity, placement and migration control. IBM keeps dedicated instances dedicated through their lifecycle and automatically migrates workloads if a host fails.; billing: Hourly or monthly dedicated-instance and host choices are active in the Global Catalog, but their higher starting prices are not used as the provider's minimum benchmark., name: Virtual Servers for Classic — transient; category: interruptible_full_admin_virtual_machine; service model: First-in-first-out spare Classic capacity at a lower price for fault-tolerant development/test workloads. It can be deprovisioned and is excluded from the continuous benchmark., name: IBM Power Virtual Server in IBM data centers; category: self_managed_power_lpar_virtual_machine; service model: Pay-as-you-use PowerVM logical partitions on IBM Power systems, isolated from x86 IBM Cloud infrastructure, with customer administration of AIX, IBM i or Linux. Workspaces, compute, SAN volumes, snapshots, networks and images are managed through IBM Cloud UI, CLI, API or Terraform.; processor modes: shared capped, shared uncapped, dedicated; tenancy: The standard service is multi-tenant. A separately billed Power Virtual Server dedicated host reserves an entire supported Power server for one customer and can contain customer VSIs and shared processor pools.; billing boundary: CPU/core mode, memory, storage, snapshots, OS and workload licenses are separately metered. Anonymous documentation directs buyers to the estimator for current location- and machine-specific totals, so no synthetic PowerVS bundle is ranked., name: Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization Service on IBM Cloud; category: managed_kubevirt_guest_virtual_machine_platform; service model: Generally available since 26 June 2026. IBM creates a managed OpenShift 4.21+ virtualization cluster on VPC bare-metal workers with KubeVirt/KVM, OVN networking and preinstalled virtualization operators; customers create, size, start and administer guest VMs from templates or YAML with console and cloud-init access.; availability: Dallas (us-south), Washington DC (us-east), Toronto (ca-tor), Montreal (ca-mon), Frankfurt (eu-de); billing boundary: Infrastructure, OpenShift Virtualization Engine licensing and storage are billed at cluster/worker level. It is a VM platform rather than a small standalone VPS bundle, so the Nano VPC and Classic offers remain the comparable benchmarks.

Operating systems

vpc x86 stock images: CentOS Stream 9.x, CentOS Stream 10.x, Debian 11.x, Debian 12.x, Debian 13.x, Fedora CoreOS, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.x, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9.x, Red Hat Enterprise Linux for SAP 8.x, Red Hat Enterprise Linux for SAP 9.x, RHEL AI 1.x, Rocky Linux 8.x, Rocky Linux 9.x, Rocky Linux 10.x, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 15.x, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 16.x, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for SAP 15.x, Ubuntu Server 22.04.x, Ubuntu Server 24.04.x, Windows Server 2016, Windows Server 2019, Windows Server 2022, Windows Server 2025; vpc bundles: Eligible stock-image bundles include Microsoft SQL Server and licensed Linux variants; OS/software charges are profile and image dependent and are excluded from the free-Linux benchmarks.; vpc custom images: Import Linux, Windows, z/OS or generic qcow2/VHD images from IBM Cloud Object Storage, create an image from a VPC boot volume, or share through a private catalog. Linux images require cloud-init and Windows images require cloudbase-init; custom images are generally 10–250 GB.; classic: The current Classic documentation and release feed expose RHEL 9.6, Rocky Linux 8.10 and 9.6, Ubuntu 20.04 LTS and Debian 12, and the profile documentation also supports RHEL, CentOS, Windows, Ubuntu and other eligible images. The exact live account catalog is authentication-gated, so versions beyond the current first-party releases are not invented.; power virtual server: AIX 7.2/7.3, IBM i 7.4/7.5 and eligible older/service-extension levels, RHEL 8/9 and SLES 15/16 stock or BYOL images, including SAP variants. Exact supported levels depend on Power9/10/11 hardware; current documentation includes AIX 7.3 TL4, IBM i 7.5 TR7, RHEL 9.6 and SLES 16.; openshift virtualization: Preconfigured Fedora and CentOS Stream guest templates are documented. Customers can create VM templates/images and use cloud-init; the OVE service does not include a RHEL guest subscription, so licensed guest OS rights remain a separate customer concern.; withdrawn s390x boundary: LinuxONE Ubuntu/SLES, Hyper Protect and Wazi z/OS images are not included as orderable products because new s390x instance provisioning ended 28 February 2026.

Virtualization

vpc x86: IBM-provided KVM hypervisors with QEMU/virtio devices. Current custom-kernel requirements explicitly enable KVM guest support, and IBM's encryption documentation identifies QEMU on IBM-provided KVM hypervisors.; classic: Citrix Hypervisor; older Classic documentation may still call the underlying Xen console functions KVM, but IBM explicitly identifies Citrix Hypervisor as the VM hypervisor.; power virtual server: IBM PowerVM logical partitions (LPARs).; openshift virtualization: KVM through KubeVirt on Red Hat OpenShift, hosted on VPC bare-metal workers.; nested virtualization: not_found

CPU isolation

directory classification: product_and_profile_dependent; vpc nano burstable: Shared. The 10%, 25% and 50% nxf-1x1 settings share host CPU and can opportunistically burst to at most twice the configured baseline when idle capacity exists.; vpc nano fixed 100: Guaranteed virtual allocation. IBM calls the 100% Nano setting a fixed baseline for consistent performance, but Flex cannot use dedicated hosts and no dedicated physical core is promised.; vpc other public: Multi-tenant virtual CPU unless a profile-specific dedicated-host placement or dedicated-core statement applies; exact isolation varies by profile family and generation.; vpc dedicated hosts: Dedicated single-tenant host hardware; guest vCPUs consume capacity from that customer-reserved host.; classic public compute: Guaranteed. IBM's active catalog says cores and RAM are dedicated to each Classic VM with no oversubscription, but C1.1x1 remains a public multi-tenant VM and the source does not identify each vCPU as an exclusive physical core.; classic variable compute: Shared; IBM explicitly documents host CPU oversubscription for U1 variable-compute profiles.; classic dedicated: Single-tenant instance or host isolation, depending on the selected deployment model.; power virtual server: Selectable shared capped, shared uncapped or dedicated processor mode. Shared modes are shared among clients; dedicated mode allocates processor resources to the specific client. Dedicated hosts reserve the complete server, although customer-created shared pools can still share its capacity among that customer's VSIs.; openshift virtualization: Guest vCPU is scheduled by KubeVirt across customer cluster capacity; no default dedicated physical-core promise was found for an individual guest.

Features

• App installation root vm methods: Install arbitrary compatible software with root/administrator control after a stock, custom, catalog or Classic image build. VPC user data uses cloud-init/cloud-config or shell scripts; Classic supports image templates and provisioning scripts; PowerVS supports images and cloud-init for Linux.; catalog and automation: IBM Cloud private catalogs and deployable architectures can distribute approved VPC images and Terraform-based stacks. Schematics runs Terraform templates to provision and configure IBM Cloud infrastructure.; openshift virtualization: Create a guest from a provider/template image or YAML, adjust CPU/memory/storage, pass cloud-init data and use its console. IBM manages the OpenShift virtualization platform, while the customer manages guest applications and OS state.; boundary: Code Engine and Red Hat OpenShift container applications are adjacent IBM Cloud services; they are not described as software installed inside the benchmark VSI.
  ✓
• Templates & images vpc: Reusable instance templates define profile, image, volumes and interfaces; templates can create individual VMs or static/autoscaling instance groups. Stock/custom/catalog images, boot-volume images, point-in-time block snapshots and policy-driven Backup for VPC are available through console, CLI, API and Terraform.; classic: Capture and deploy image templates, load/import eligible images, attach SAN/local disks and use optional IBM Cloud Backup for Classic.; power virtual server: Stock and customer images, server placement groups, storage snapshots and reusable workspace automation are current resources.; openshift virtualization: VM templates, images, snapshots, cloning and live migration are supported; snapshot/clone availability depends on the selected storage implementation.; backup boundary: Snapshots and policy backups are separately billable data-protection resources and do not replace a cross-region disaster-recovery design.
  ✓
• Network orchestration vpc: Customer-defined VPCs, zonal subnets, virtual network interfaces and reserved private addresses; custom routes/tables; public gateways for subnet SNAT; floating IPs for 1:1 inbound/outbound access; public address ranges; security groups and network ACLs; VPN, Direct Link, Transit Gateway, Private Path and virtual private endpoints.; high availability: Host-spread and power-spread placement groups, multi-zone instance groups/autoscaling, load balancers and default host-failure restart policy are available. VPC resources are operated with console, CLI, API and the IBM Terraform provider.; classic: Public/private VLANs and subnets, automatically assigned primary IP, optional public static IPv6, selectable uplink, private-network traffic and VPN access. The SoftLayer API, CLI and Terraform provider manage Classic infrastructure.; power virtual server: Dedicated Power networks, Power Edge Router, Transit Gateway connectivity, reserved addresses, network security groups, routes, interfaces and placement groups; Direct Link Cloud Connect remains only for specified legacy locations/workspaces.; traffic: VPC internet egress and public addresses are separately metered and no transfer allowance is attributed to the Nano benchmark. Classic monthly public VSIs include 250 GB egress and hourly VSIs include none; inbound and same-account Classic private-network traffic are free under the documented rules.; ddos: IBM Cloud Internet Services offers optional Cloudflare-backed DDoS protection; it is not bundled into the raw benchmark VM price.
  ✓
• Firewall vpc security groups: Stateful allow rules on VM interfaces, endpoint gateways, load balancers and other targets. The default group denies inbound and permits outbound unless the customer changes it.; vpc network acls: Ordered, stateless allow/deny rules at subnet level, independent of guest firewalls.; advanced options: Custom routing through customer virtual firewall appliances is supported. Cloud Internet Services adds optional public-edge IP firewall, WAF, rate limiting and DDoS controls.; classic: Classic security groups plus separately selectable software/hardware firewall services are active; guest OS firewalls remain customer-managed.; power: Power Virtual Server exposes network security-group resources in its current catalog/API.; automation: Console, CLI, API and Terraform cover VPC security groups and ACLs; CIS has console/CLI/API controls.
  ✓
• Load balancer vpc application load balancer: Managed public or private regional ALB for layer 7/web and eligible layer 4 workloads, TLS offload, health checks and same-region VPC backends.; vpc network load balancer: Layer 4 public, private, Private Path and private routing-mode NLB variants with a highly available VIP, direct server return and multi-zone backend membership.; global: Cloud Internet Services supplies DNS-based global load balancing, geographic routing, health probes and failover across origins.; classic: Classic load-balancer and appliance offerings remain in the active infrastructure catalog; Classic VMs can also sit behind external/customer load balancers.; price boundary: Load balancers are separate paid resources and no load-balancer charge is included in any benchmark VM.
  ✓
• DNS management private dns: IBM Cloud DNS Services creates private zones and records resolvable only from permitted VPC networks, supports split-horizon names, forward/reverse lookup, custom resolvers, health checks and global-load-balancer records. UI, CLI and API are supported.; public dns: IBM Cloud Internet Services is the public authoritative DNS route. It supports delegated zones, proxied or DNS-only records, CNAME flattening, DNSSEC and batch record changes, plus optional global load balancing.; reverse dns: Private DNS supports reverse lookup. Classic and public-IP PTR workflows are product/address dependent; a universal in-panel PTR commitment for every VPC address was not inferred.; price boundary: DNS Services and CIS are separate IBM Cloud services and their fees are not included in the VM benchmarks.
  ✓
• Git integrations infrastructure workflow: IBM Cloud Schematics imports Terraform workspaces from GitHub, GitLab or Bitbucket repositories and can provision VPC VM/network/storage stacks through the IBM Terraform provider.; additional sources: Current planning documentation also names Azure DevOps for public/private Git workspace sources; private repositories require a token or approved secret/credential workflow.; module sources: Terraform modules can come from GitHub, GitLab, IBM GitLab, Terraform Registry, IBM Catalog, Object Storage/S3 or Artifactory.; boundary: This is an infrastructure-as-code integration that can deploy the VM; it is not an agent automatically installed inside every benchmark guest.
  ✓
• Container registry ibm registry: IBM Cloud Container Registry is an IBM-managed private registry with IAM, regional endpoints and vulnerability scanning integrations; Red Hat OpenShift on IBM Cloud integrates it through image-pull secrets.; external registries: IBM Cloud Code Engine can deploy public Docker Hub images directly and authenticated images from private Docker Hub or other private registries using registry secrets. It can automatically manage access to IBM Cloud Container Registry in the same account.; openshift: OpenShift workloads can use IBM Cloud Container Registry, public registries and customer-managed registry credentials.; vsi boundary: Container registries are integrations for IBM's adjacent Code Engine/OpenShift container platforms, not accepted boot-image sources for a raw VPC or Classic VSI. VPC VM boot images instead use Image Service, Object Storage, snapshots or private catalogs.
  ✓