Infrastructure Maintenance

Oracle Cloud Infrastructure supports a variety of maintenance actions for compute instances including live migration, scheduled maintenance, rebuild in place, and manual migration. The maintenance action depends on characteristics such as the shape that the instance uses.

If an instance supports reboot migration or rebuild in place, click the Maintenance tab. The maintenance details page indicates when the planned maintenance is scheduled to start. The maintenance start and end time are shown in the Scheduled to Start column. For instances that only support manual migration, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure sends you a notification and a maintenance event is shown in the maintenance details page.

An instance is no longer impacted by a maintenance event when the Maintenance tab is empty.

You can extend the maintenance due date for instances that are scheduled for maintenance or termination. Extending the deadline is supported for reboot migration maintenance, which is typically scheduled on VM and bare metal instances that use standard or flex shapes. OCI determines the latest possible time that the due date can be extended to.

When the underlying infrastructure for an instance is unhealthy, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure automatically attempts to recover the instance. The maintenance action depends on the type of instance.

• Virtual machine (VM) instances: When possible, the instance is live migrated to a healthy physical host. If live migration isn't possible, the instance is reboot migrated or rebuilt in place, depending on the shape.
• Bare metal instances: When possible, the instance is reboot migrated to a healthy physical host. If reboot migration isn't possible, you must manually migrate the instance.

When an infrastructure maintenance event affects VM instances, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure live migrates supported VM instances from the physical VM host that needs maintenance to a new VM host with minimal disruption to running instances.

If a VM instance can't be live migrated or doesn't support live migration, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure schedules a maintenance due date within 14 to 16 days and sends you a notification describing the type of maintenance action that is required, such as reboot migration. A live migration might not succeed if any of the following events happen during the migration: there is too much activity on the instance, a change to the instance is made using the API, or an internal error unrelated to the instance occurs.

If a VM instance is scheduled for maintenance, you can proactively reboot migrate the instance at any time before the scheduled maintenance due date. Proactively reboot migrating lets you control how and when your applications experience downtime. If you don't proactively reboot migrate the instance before the due date, the instance is either reboot migrated or rebuilt in place for you, depending on the shape.

Customer-managed maintenance for VM instances is supported on standard and dense I/O instance shapes, including platform images and custom images that were imported from outside of Oracle Cloud Infrastructure.

For standard and DenseIO shapes, you can extend the maintenance due date.

After a migration, by default the instance is recovered to the same lifecycle state as before the maintenance event. If you have an alternate process to recover the instance, you can optionally configure the instance to remain stopped after it is reboot migrated to healthy hardware.

When an infrastructure maintenance event affects bare metal instances, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure reboot migrates supported bare metal instances from the physical host that needs maintenance to a healthy host. Oracle Cloud Infrastructure schedules a maintenance due date within 14 to 16 days and sends you a notification describing the type of maintenance action that is required, such as reboot migration. Within 24 hours after the maintenance due date, the bare metal instance is stopped, migrated to a healthy host, and restarted. A short downtime occurs during the migration.

If a bare metal instance is scheduled for maintenance, you can proactively reboot the instance at any time before the scheduled maintenance due date. Proactively rebooting lets you control how and when your applications experience downtime. If you do not proactively reboot the instance before the due date, the instance is reboot migrated for you.

Reboot migration for bare metal instances is supported on standard instance shapes that use Linux-based platform images. Reboot migration for bare metal instances is not supported for instances that use Windows or custom images, shielded instances, instances which have secondary VNICs created and configured on physical NIC with index 1, or for instances that don't use the standard sanboot command in the iPXE script.

For standard shapes, you can extend the maintenance due date.

If you choose not to reboot before the scheduled time, then Oracle Cloud Infrastructure migrates or rebuilds the instance. After a migration, by default the instance is recovered to the same lifecycle state as before the maintenance event. If you have an alternate process to recover the instance, then you can optionally configure the instance to remain stopped after it is reboot migrated to healthy hardware.

When the underlying infrastructure of a VM instance fails because of software or hardware issues, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure automatically attempts to recover the instance.

Standard VM instances are recovered using a reboot migration, which automatically restores the VM on a healthy host, whether that's the original physical host or a different physical host. The VM failure is detected within one minute of occurrence. If the host cannot be recovered immediately, a healthy move occurs, whereby the VM is moved to a different host. In this scenario, the process of migrating to and restarting on a healthy host automatically begins within five minutes. During the reboot, instance properties such as private and ephemeral public IP addresses, attached block volumes, and VNICs are preserved.

DenseIO VM instances are recovered by rebooting the instance on the same physical host. If recovering a DenseIO instance on the same physical host isn't possible, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure notifies you to reboot migrate or delete (terminate) the instance within 14 days. If reboot migration is used, local NVMe data is still lost. If you don't delete the instance before the deadline, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure disables the instance on the deadline and deletes it within the next seven days. The boot volume and remote attached data volume are preserved.

Oracle Cloud Infrastructure notifies you by email or announcements of any VM infrastructure failure events, with the status of the recovery action that was taken. You can also monitor the instance status metric to stay aware of any unexpected reboots.

You can choose not to have your VMs automatically restart by configuring your instances to remain stopped after they are recovered.

You can use metrics, alarms, and notifications to monitor the maintenance status of the infrastructure that your compute instances run on. The primary metrics to consider for infrastructure maintenance are the infrastructure health metrics:

• Instance health (up/down) status: The instance_status metric lets you check whether a VM instance is available (up) or unavailable (down) when in the running state. If the instance is unavailable for more than 30 minutes, contact support.
• Instance maintenance status: The maintenance_status metric lets you monitor whether a VM or bare metal instance is scheduled for planned infrastructure maintenance.
• Bare metal infrastructure health status: The health_status metric helps you monitor the health of the infrastructure for bare metal instances, including hardware components such as the CPU and memory.