Virtual machine flavors: Difference between revisions

A virtual machine of "c" flavor is intended for jobs of finite lifetime and for development and testing tasks. It starts from a [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qcow qcow2]-format image. Its disks reside on the local hardware running the VM and have no redundancy ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_RAID_levels#RAID_0 raid0]). The root disk is typically 20GB in size. "c" flavor VMs also have an secondary ephemeral data disk. These storage devices are created and destroyed with the instance. The Arbutus (West) cloud treats “c” flavors differently as they have no over-commit on CPU so are targeted towards CPU intensive tasks.

A virtual machine of "p" flavor is intended to run for an indeterminate length of time. There is no predefined root disk. The intended use of "p" flavors is that they should be [[OpenStack#Booting_From_a_Volume|booted from a volume]], in which case the instance will be backed by the Ceph storage system and have greater redundancy and resistance to failure than a "c" instance. We recommend using a volume size of at least 20GB for the persistent VM root disk. The Arbutus (West) cloud treats “p” flavors differently as they will be on compute nodes with a higher level of redundancy (disk and network) and do over-commit the CPU so are geared towards web servers, data base servers and instances that have a lower CPU or bursty CPU usage profile in general.