VM hibernation capability for IBM VPC instances

Introduce the ability to hibernate Windows or Linux VMs in the IBM Cloud VPC infrastructure. This would persist the memory state of the VM, effectively stopping the VM and halting hourly billing. Currently, when a VM is stopped, without hibernation, both memory and OS state are lost upon restart.

This hibernation feature is crucial for the persistent Virtual Desktop use case on IBM Cloud VPC infrastructure. In this scenario, a dedicated VM is provisioned for each user, accessible remotely (e.g., through the Dizzion Frame platform). However, to reduce costs, VMs are stopped when users are not in session, typically running only during working hours (approximately 8 hours/day, 20 days a month). Without hibernation, users would lose their work state (e.g., open apps, documents) and would have to start each workday from scratch, reopening all apps and documents. Hibernation would effectively resolve this hinderance.

In addition, this feature can be helpful in additional use-cases:

• Dev/test, and other scenarios where the VMs don't need to run 24/7

• Systems with long boot times due to memory intensive applications. These applications can be initialized on VMs and hibernated. These “pre-warmed” VMs can then be quickly started when needed, with the applications already up and running in the desired state

It's understood that hibernation may have certain limitations, such as not being applicable to GPU instances, being limited to specific instance types, and max days in suspended state, and all these limitations are acceptable.

It's worth noting that similar hibernation features have been implemented by AWS, GCP, and most recently Azure. Here are their respective documentation links for reference:

Azure - Azure VM Hibernation and Resume

AWS - Hibernate your Amazon EC2 instance

GCP - Google Cloud Compute Instance Suspend and Resume