Tag Archives: OCI

Extended memory VM instances in OCI

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While provisioning compute instances in OCI, you may come across scenarios which need more memory and cores than what the standard shapes provide. Extended memory VMs are meant to solve that problem. Such VMs are able to access cores and memory across a single physical socket and it allows them to go beyond the limits of standard shapes. There are no additional charges for using this specific feature. Customer is charged on the basis of total number of cores and total amount of memory used.

On the provisioning screen, the sliders for selecting number of cores and amount of memory allow you to go beyond the limits for standard shapes. Once you cross the limit of a standard shape, the instances becomes an extended memory instance.

There are a few things to keep in mind while provisioning such an instance:

  • Not all shapes support extended memory instances. Currently it is supported with VM.Standard3.Flex, VM.Standard.E3.Flex and VM.Standard.E4.Flex
  • Extended memory instances don’t support burstable feature.
  • Capacity reservations aren’t available with Extended memory instances.
  • Preemptible instances don’t work with this feature.
  • To take advantage of the extended memory, it is important to make the application NUMA aware when it is deployed on a Extended memory instance.

More details about extended memory instances are available in the official documentation page.

Can’t su to oracle user

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Last week, got this issue reported by a DBA that he wasn’t able to su to oracle user from root on a Oracle Base Database VM in OCI. The login of opc user worked fine and he could do sudo su to root but he couldn’t su to oracle. When he did it just came back to root shell.

[root@xxx ~]# su - oracle
Last login: Fri Jan 12 10:20:38 UTC 2023
[root@xxx ~]#

There was nothing relevant in /var/log/messages or /var/log/secure. I tried it for some other user and it worked fine. Then I suspected something with the profile of oracle user and voila ! The .bashrc looked like this

[root@xxx oracle]# pwd
/home/oracle
[root@xxx oracle]# more .bashrc
exit
[root@xxx oracle]#

So the moment it logged in with user oracle, there was an exit command in .bashrc and it used to exit. Problem solved. I don’t know who did it but it looks like a mischief done by someone.