Solaris X86 on OCI BareMetal or Virtual Machine?

For Solaris workloads Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI)
offers multiple options: Bare Metal and Virtual Machine
on AMD or Intel CPUs.

With Virtual Machines you are flexible with Memory and CPU
Configurations. From 1 OCPU (core) up to 64 and up to 1 TB RAM.
Depending on your load you can change the size of the VM, but
you need to reboot to activate the VM with the new settings.

Bare Metal have fix sizes from 512 GB RAM up to 2 TB and
between 36 OCPU up to 160 OCPU. The available shapes
may be limited on your cloud region.
Bare Metal have currently the limitation you can't attach
UHP (Ultra High Performance) block volumes.

For both types Bare Metal and VM you are not charged if you shutdown
your instance.

My current favorite is the VM type because of the flexibility to resize.
So far I did not encounter high performance impact by the Virtualization layer.

Solaris 11.4 x86 in Oracle Cloud OCI VM

Oracle currently offers the Oracle Cloud in 40 regions.
One of the many options available is a Solaris 11.4 x86 Virtual Machine.
You can create a VM with up to 1TB RAM and 64 OCPUs (cores).

The creation is very easy and the setup is done in a few minutes.

How to create a VM can be found on the Oracle Solaris Blog


The OS management is currently not available to monitor the Solaris instances.
The commercial JomaSoft VDCF tool is an option to be used for monitoring.

I/O performance depends on the configuration of the block volumes and on
the CPU resources used by the Virtual Machine.
But even with 16 cores I never reached more than 100MB/s