A Compartment Quota in Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) is used to control and restrict the amount of resources that can be consumed within a specific compartment.

It allows administrators to define a maximum limit for supported resources such as:

• Compute OCPUs
• Memory
• Storage
• Other supported OCI resources

Unlike Service Limits, which are defined by Oracle for the tenancy, Compartment Quotas are administrator-defined limits used to control resource consumption within a compartment.

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The objective of this practical was to verify that a Compartment Quota can restrict Compute resource consumption.

Our requirement was to restrict a compartment so that only two 1-OCPU VM.Standard.E4.Flex instances could be created.

We achieved this by setting the E4 Compute OCPU quota to 2 OCPUs.

Compartment

→ E4 Compute Quota = 2 OCPUs

→ Instance 1 = 1 OCPU → Allowed ✅

→ Instance 2 = 1 OCPU → Allowed ✅

→ Instance 3 = 1 OCPU → Restricted ❌

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For this testing, we used:

Shape: VM.Standard.E4.Flex

OCPU per Instance: 1

Instance	Shape	OCPU
Instance 1	VM.Standard.E4.Flex	1
Instance 2	VM.Standard.E4.Flex	1
Instance 3	VM.Standard.E4.Flex	1

Configured quota:

E4 Compute Quota = 2 OCPUs

Therefore:

• Instance 1 → 1 OCPU → Allowed ✅
• Instance 2 → 1 OCPU → Allowed ✅
• Instance 3 → 1 OCPU → Restricted ❌

The relevant E4 Compute quota is:

standard-e4-core-count

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OCI Compartment Quotas are configured using quota policy statements.

The basic syntax is:

set <service-family> quota <quota-name> to <value> in compartment <compartment-name>

For E4 Compute OCPU quota, the relevant values are:

Service Family: compute-core

Quota: standard-e4-core-count

Example:

set compute-core quota standard-e4-core-count to 2 in compartment Test-Compartment

This means that the specified compartment can consume a maximum of 2 E4 Compute OCPUs under this quota.

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Created:

• Shape: VM.Standard.E4.Flex
• OCPU: 1

Instance 1 → Created Successfully ✅

Quota calculation:

• Configured Quota = 2 OCPUs
• Used = 1 OCPU
• Remaining = 1 OCPU

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Created another:

• Shape: VM.Standard.E4.Flex
• OCPU: 1

Instance 2 → Created Successfully ✅

Quota calculation:

• Configured Quota = 2 OCPUs
• Used = 2 OCPUs
• Remaining = 0 OCPU

At this point, the complete E4 OCPU quota has been consumed.

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Attempted to create another:

• Shape: VM.Standard.E4.Flex
• OCPU: 1

The resource requirement becomes:

Existing Usage = 2 OCPUs

New Request = 1 OCPU

Total Required = 3 OCPUs

However, the configured quota is only:

Maximum Allowed = 2 OCPUs

Therefore, the third instance could not be created under the configured resource restriction.

During our practical test, the third instance creation resulted in an:

Out of Capacity

error.

Note: An Out of Capacity error can have multiple causes in OCI, including actual infrastructure capacity limitations. Therefore, when documenting a quota test, the configured quota and current resource usage should also be verified.

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Test	Instance	OCPU Requested	Result
1	E4 Flex Instance 1	1	✅ Created
2	E4 Flex Instance 2	1	✅ Created
3	E4 Flex Instance 3	1	❌ Restricted

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Configured E4 Quota = 2 OCPUs

Instance 1 = 1 OCPU

Instance 2 = 1 OCPU

Total Used = 2 OCPUs

When Instance 3 was requested:

Existing Usage = 2 OCPUs

Additional Request = 1 OCPU

Total Required = 3 OCPUs

Configured Quota = 2 OCPUs

Therefore:

3 OCPUs Required > 2 OCPUs Allowed

→ Third Instance Creation Restricted ❌

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• Compartment Quota is used to control resource consumption within a compartment.
• Quotas are configured by administrators.
• Quotas are different from Service Limits.
• A quota can restrict Compute resources based on supported resource types.
• For VM.Standard.E4.Flex, the relevant E4 OCPU quota is standard-e4-core-count.
• By configuring the quota to 2 OCPUs, two 1-OCPU E4 Flex instances can consume the available quota.
• A third 1-OCPU instance would require a total of 3 OCPUs, exceeding the configured quota.
• Quotas help with:
  • Resource governance
  • Cost control
  • Preventing uncontrolled resource consumption
  • Environment-level resource management

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Consider an organization with separate compartments for different environments:

Development

→ E4 Quota = 10 OCPUs

Testing

→ E4 Quota = 5 OCPUs

Production

→ E4 Quota = 50 OCPUs

This allows an organization to control how much Compute capacity each environment can consume.

For example, if the Testing compartment has an E4 quota of 5 OCPUs, it can consume up to 5 E4 OCPUs according to the configured quota.

Once the configured quota is fully consumed, additional instances requiring the same quota resource cannot be provisioned within that limit.

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In this practical, we used an OCI Compartment Quota to control E4 Compute resource consumption.

We configured:

Quota: standard-e4-core-count

Maximum: 2 OCPUs

We then created two:

VM.Standard.E4.Flex instances

with:

1 OCPU each

Both instances were created successfully because their combined usage was:

1 + 1 = 2 OCPUs

When we attempted to create a third 1-OCPU instance, the total required capacity became:

1 + 1 + 1 = 3 OCPUs

which was beyond the configured quota of:

2 OCPUs

This practical demonstrates how OCI Compartment Quotas can be used to control and govern Compute resource consumption within a compartment.

Navigation Menu → Governance & Administration → Tenancy Management → Quota Policies

Create two instances using the VM.Standard.E4.Flex shape, with 1 OCPU assigned to each instance.

Getting an error while creating the third instance in the same compartment because the configured quota limit has been reached.