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Flavors

Understanding Flavors

Flavors define the resource specifications of a virtual machine, including CPU, memory, disk space, and additional features.

OpenStack VM flavors come in various configurations, each tailored to meet specific workload requirements. Key parameters of a flavor include:

  • CPU: Specifies the number of virtual CPUs (vCPUs) allocated to the VM.
  • RAM: Determines the amount of memory (in MB or GB) assigned to the VM.
  • Disk: Indicates the size of the VM's ephemeral disk (Not used in Switch Cloud Compute)

Important

Switch has defined the flavors available for Switch Cloud Compute.

Switch Cloud Compute Flavors Naming

Pattern:

c<CPU>r<RAM>, where:

  • CPU: Number of vCPUs (3 digits)
  • RAM: RAM in GB (3 digits)

Examples:

  • c001r001: 1 vCPU, 1GB RAM
  • c004r016: 4 vCPUs, 16GB RAM

Purposes of Different Flavors

General-Purpose Flavors:

These flavors offer a balanced combination of CPU, and memory, suitable for a wide range of workloads, including web servers, and development environments.

Name vCPUs RAM
c001r002 1 2 GB
c001r004 1 4 GB
c002r004 2 4 GB
c002r008 2 8 GB
c004r008 4 8 GB
c004r016 4 16 GB
c008r016 8 16 GB
c008r032 8 32 GB
c016r032 16 32 GB
c016r064 16 64 GB
c032r064 32 64 GB
c032r128 32 128 GB

Memory-Optimized Flavors:

Designed for memory-intensive applications such as in-memory databases, caching servers, and big data analytics. These flavors allocate a significant amount of RAM to support data-intensive operations efficiently.

Name vCPUs RAM
c001r008 1 8 GB
c002r016 2 16 GB
c004r032 4 32 GB
c008r064 8 64 GB
c016r128 16 128 GB
c032r256 32 256 GB

Compute-Optimized Flavors:

Ideal for CPU-bound workloads that require high computational power, such as video encoding, rendering, and scientific simulations. These flavors prioritize CPU resources to optimize performance.

Name vCPUs RAM
c001r001 1 1 GB
c002r002 2 2 GB
c004r004 4 4 GB
c008r008 8 8 GB
c016r016 16 16 GB
c032r032 32 32 GB
c032r064 32 64 GB

By selecting the appropriate flavor for each application, organizations can optimize performance, enhance resource utilization, and deliver exceptional user experiences across a wide range of use cases.

Use Cases for Different Flavors

  • Web Application Hosting: General-purpose flavors are well-suited for hosting web applications, providing sufficient CPU and memory resources to handle incoming traffic efficiently.
  • Big Data Processing: Memory-optimized flavors excel in processing large datasets and running memory-intensive analytics tasks, making them ideal for big data processing frameworks like Apache Spark and Hadoop.
  • Performance Computing: Compute-optimized flavors are indispensable for running computationally intensive simulations, mathematical modeling, and scientific research.