Learn About Amazon VGT2 Learning Manager Chanci Turner
We’ve heard from customers about the need for a more straightforward way to bring and manage existing licenses for Microsoft Windows Server and SQL Server on AWS. Today, we are thrilled to introduce a new, simplified bring-your-own-license (BYOL) experience.
When launching instances of Windows Server or SQL Server, customers can choose between pay-as-you-go licenses from AWS or their existing licenses. By opting for AWS’s licenses, customers benefit from a fully compliant pay-as-you-go model, eliminating the complexities of managing licensing terms. The newly launched BYOL experience allows those wishing to use their own Windows Server or SQL Server licenses to easily create virtual machines in EC2, while AWS ensures compliance with the licensing guidelines provided by the customer.
In the past, customers bringing their own server-bound licenses had to implement additional automation to manage capacity and efficiently utilize the dedicated hosts required for BYOL. This made host management cumbersome and less user-friendly compared to the seamless experience offered by AWS-provided licenses. The new BYOL experience simplifies host management by automating essential tasks such as host allocation and release, capacity management, and enabling features like auto-scaling and auto-recovery. Consequently, creating a BYOL instance on Dedicated Host is now as easy as launching any other EC2 instance.
Let’s walk through this new, user-friendly process for bringing a licensed image to the AWS Cloud. I’ll demonstrate using a Windows Server license; however, the experience is identical if you are bringing Windows Server and SQL Server licenses.
Setting Up License Management
Once my licensed image is imported and available as a private AMI in Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), I proceed to the AWS License Manager console to create a license configuration. I begin by clicking “Create license configuration” from the License Configurations page. I provide a name, an optional description, and set the license type to Cores. While I can specify an upper limit for cores—recommended based on the number of licenses I’m bringing—I’ll leave that unset for this walkthrough. Clicking “Submit” creates the new license configuration, which appears on the License Configurations page.
Next, I need to associate the AMI containing my licensed operating system image with the configuration. After selecting the configuration, I choose “Associate AMI” from the Actions menu. This directs me to a page listing my custom images, where I select the desired image and click “Associate.” Notably, I can choose to associate multiple images, such as both my Windows Server and SQL Server images.
Now that I have set up my license configuration for Windows Server—I could have also set up a configuration for SQL Server—I need to create a Host resource group and link it to the license configuration. A Host resource group is essentially a collection of Dedicated Hosts managed together as a single unit based on my preferences. I start by selecting “Host resource groups” from the navigation panel, then click “Create host resource group.”
I assign a name to my Host resource group and select the desired license configurations to associate with this group (multiple selections are allowed), then click “Create.” By keeping the EC2 Dedicated Host management options selected, I ensure that I don’t need to manage capacity and Dedicated Hosts manually. AWS License Manager will automatically handle my hosts when I launch instances into a Host resource group, ensuring compliance with any configured license limits.
That wraps up the setup of my license configuration and Host resource group, so I can now head to the Amazon EC2 console to launch instances. Before doing so, I want to highlight another feature of the new BYOL experience—integration with AWS Organizations. If my account serves as the master account for an Organization, an additional option appears when creating Host resource groups: “Share host resource group with all my member accounts.” Selecting this option allows the Host resource group to be shared with the member accounts in my Organization. Consequently, when member accounts launch instances, hosts are allocated automatically in my master account, allowing for greater host utilization without needing separate hosts in every member account.
Launching an Automatically Managed BYOL Image
In the Amazon EC2 console, I click “Launch instance” and select the AMI containing my licensed Windows Server version (or Windows Server with SQL Server). After choosing the instance type, I arrive at the Configure Instance Details page.
In the launch wizard, since I selected an image associated with a license configuration, the Tenancy is automatically set to the required Dedicated host—”Launch this instance on a Dedicated host.” I toggle the option under Host resource group to “Launch instance into a host resource group” and select the appropriate group. If I only have one group, EC2 will automatically launch the instance in the designated Host resource group based on the attached license configuration without further input from me.
To optimize utilization, the new experience also supports heterogeneous instance types on Dedicated Hosts. This means that if I launch different-sized instances from the same family, they can be placed together on the same host, a significant improvement from the previous limitation of only allowing instances of the same size and family to reside on a single host.
At this juncture, I can click “Review and launch,” although I likely have additional settings for storage, tags, and security groups to specify before proceeding. Once the instances are launched, selecting any instance in the console reveals in the Details tab that it is associated with a Host resource group. I can also click the Host ID for further details about the host.
BYOL, Auto Scaling, and Dedicated Hosts
The automatic management of instances launched via Auto Scaling onto Dedicated Hosts is another significant advantage of the new BYOL support, and it’s easy to implement. In the launch wizard mentioned earlier, I could have created and specified a new Auto Scaling group, but I opted to create a Launch Template instead to define settings for my Auto Scaling group. In the provided snapshots, you can see that all I need to do in the launch template is select my licensed image and, under Advanced Details, my license configuration.
Next, I simply specify the template when creating an Auto Scaling group, and I’m all set! As new instances are launched in the group during scaling events, they’ll automatically map onto a Dedicated Host, enhancing overall efficiency.
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