Amazon EC2 Dedicated Hosts allow you to use your eligible software licenses from vendors such as Microsoft and Oracle on Amazon EC2, so that you get the flexibility and cost effectiveness of using your own licenses, but with the resiliency, simplicity and elasticity of the AWS Cloud. An Amazon EC2 Dedicated Host is a physical server fully dedicated for your use, so you can help address corporate compliance requirements.
Amazon EC2 Dedicated Host is also integrated with AWS License Manager, a service which helps you manage your software licenses, including Windows and SQL Server licenses. In License Manager, you can specify your licensing terms for governing license usage, as well as your Dedicated Host management preferences for host allocation and host capacity utilization. Once setup, AWS takes care of these administrative tasks on your behalf, so that you can seamlessly launch virtual machines (instances) on Dedicated Hosts just like you would launch an EC2 instance with AWS provided licenses.
Use AWS License Manager to start managing your dedicated hosts.
Dedicated Hosts allow you to use your existing per-socket, per-core, or per-VM software licenses, including Microsoft Windows Server, Microsoft SQL Server, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, or other software licenses that are bound to VMs, sockets, or physical cores, subject to your license terms. This helps you to save money by leveraging your existing investments. Learn more about your Windows licensing options.
Some organizations need to run their instances on dedicated servers instead of multi-tenant servers. With Dedicated Hosts, you get a physical server that is dedicated for your use. Dedicated Hosts provide visibility and the option to control how you place your instances on a specific, physical server. This enables you to deploy instances using configurations that help address corporate compliance and regulatory requirements.
A common scenario are customers that choose to license their SQL Server licenses against the sockets or cores on a physical machine,they need to use these licenses on Dedicated Hosts. The use of Dedicated Hosts allows you use a per-core or per-socket SQL Server licensing model, and you do not need to have active Software Assurance for licenses that are purchased prior to October 1, 2019 and which are not upgraded to versions released after October 1, 2019.
Customers that want to have license usage reporting, can use AWS License Manager to define license rules that allow them to ensure license usage per Sockets, Cores, vCPUs and Instances tenacy.
Host resource groups allow you to create a collection of EC2 dedicated hosts. Host Resource Groups automate the management process of allocating and releasing hosts to match your runtime needs.
We will create a license configuration based on cores that will be used with our host resource group.
We will associate the per core license configuration with the Oracle AMI that we created earlier.
This AMI has Oracle community edition installed for the purposes of our workshop. In a practical deployment you may install
a licensed version of Oracle for which you have per core license purchases that you want to use.
We will now create our Host Resource Group and associate it to the license configuration we created in the previous section.
We’ll now launch an EC2 instance using the Host Resource Group configuration we just created.