A very common question I come across a lot is “how to change the size of the Compute Instance (VM)“. Currently this is not “natively” possible, but with some manual labor very doable!.
Happily OCI does support terminating an Instance while keeping the boot and data volumes. If you instance works with a reserved Public IP address you can also re-use that. The private IP address can be re-used in all cases.
So in short you have to delete the Instance, create a new instance of the shape you want, give it the same boot and data volumes, give it the same private and public IP and you are good to go.
Ok, these are a few steps, so the OCI team has released a white paper to explain this in detail:
https://cloud.oracle.com/iaas/whitepapers/resizing-compute-instances-oci.pdf
Of course having a script that does all this would be nice 🙂 So I started work on this and will hopefully publish it soon… keep watching this space!
Please bear in mind that there is a caveat when changing shapes. There are limitations to what one reshapes their instance to. For instance, I cannot go from VM.Standard1.1 to VM.Standard2.1, incompatibilities apply.
Nice post though!