Amazon EC2 Dedicated Hosts

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 AWS. 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 Microsoft Windows Server and Microsoft 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.

You have visibility of the number of sockets and physical cores that support your instances on a Dedicated Host. You can use this information to manage licensing for your own server-bound software that is licensed per-socket or per-core.

Affinity allows you to specify which Dedicated Host an instance will run on after it has been stopped and restarted. This gives you the confidence that the instance will run on the same physical server even through planned interruptions, helps reduce licensing costs in scenarios that require license affinity for a period of time (e.g., 90 days), and can be used to maintain an instance placement scheme.

Using AWS License Manager, you can easily track and manage your software licenses on EC2 Dedicated Hosts. You can also specify licensing rules such as counting the number of sockets and physical cores and tracking scenarios such as 90-day license affinity.

You have the option to launch instances onto a specific Dedicated Host, or you can let Amazon EC2 place the instances automatically. Controlling instance placement allows you to deploy applications to address licensing, corporate compliance, and regulatory requirements.

You can run different instance sizes within the same instance family on a Dedicated Host by leveraging the Nitro-based instances. This allows you to maximize utilization of your Dedicated Host fleet as well as your software licenses.

AWS Config continuously monitors and records when instances are launched, stopped, or terminated on a Dedicated Host. It pairs this information with host and instance level information, such as the host ID, AMI IDs, and number of sockets and physical cores per host. As a result, AWS Config can be used as a data source to meet your compliance needs. To get started, enable Dedicated Host Recording in AWS Config.