This article is authored by Sarah Johnson and Mike Thompson, both Senior Specialist Solutions Architects. Since the launch of Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) Dedicated Hosts in 2015, customers have leveraged this feature to utilize their eligible software licenses from vendors like Microsoft and Oracle. Over the years, Amazon EC2 Dedicated Hosts have evolved, offering new functionalities such as the ability to launch various instance sizes within the same family and the use of AWS License Manager for effective software license tracking. With Host Resource Groups, automated host management has become more accessible. Moreover, the option to incorporate license-included Windows Server on Dedicated Hosts has introduced fresh avenues for cost savings.
The option to bring your own license (BYOL) to Amazon EC2 Dedicated Hosts has proven to be an excellent cost-saving strategy for users. Since the inception of Dedicated Hosts, customers have expressed the need for more flexibility to reduce licensing expenses further on AWS. We’ve listened to this feedback and are excited to announce the launch of a new variant of Amazon EC2 Dedicated Hosts designed specifically to maximize cost efficiency.
In this post, we explore the benefits of our latest addition to the Amazon EC2 Dedicated Hosts lineup—the T3 Dedicated Host. This is the first Dedicated Host to support general-purpose burstable T3 instances, offering the most economical method for utilizing eligible BYOL software on dedicated hardware.
Introducing T3 Dedicated Hosts
When we engage with our customers regarding BYOL, we frequently encounter several key inquiries:
- We currently operate our workloads on-premises and wish to transition to AWS with BYOL.
- We benefit from oversubscribing CPU resources on our on-premises hosts and want to preserve these advantages when migrating our eligible BYOL software to AWS.
- How can we optimize costs in our AWS environment while enhancing the flexibility and effectiveness of our licenses?
- Some of our virtual servers utilize minimal resources. How can we deploy smaller instance sizes under BYOL?
T3 Dedicated Hosts stand apart from our traditional EC2 Dedicated Hosts. While conventional Dedicated Hosts allocate fixed CPU resources, T3 Dedicated Hosts support burstable instances that share CPU resources. This allows for a baseline CPU performance level while enabling bursts as necessary. The ability to share CPU resources, or oversubscription, lets a single T3 Dedicated Host support up to four times more instances compared to standard general-purpose Dedicated Hosts. This increase in instance capacity can result in savings of up to 70% on licensing and infrastructure costs for customers.
Advantages of T3 Dedicated Hosts
T3 Dedicated Hosts help lower total cost of ownership (TCO) by facilitating a higher instance density than other EC2 Dedicated Hosts. Burstable T3 instances enable customers to consolidate a larger number of instances with low-to-moderate average CPU utilization onto fewer hosts than ever before.
Additionally, T3 Dedicated Hosts provide smaller instance sizes with an array of vCPU and memory configurations compared to other EC2 Dedicated Hosts. These smaller instance sizes can contribute to reduced TCO and help achieve consolidation ratios that meet or exceed those of on-premises hosts.
AWS hypervisor management features ensure consistent performance for workloads, offering a wide variety of instance configurations with various vCPU and memory sizes, ranging from t3.nano to t3.2xlarge. You can utilize existing eligible software licenses, including those for Windows Server, SQL Server, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server, and Red Hat Enterprise Linux. As licensing terms can change, it’s advisable to verify BYOL eligibility with your licensing vendor.
For tracking license usage, AWS License Manager is a valuable tool. For more on this topic, check out this excellent resource: Manage Software Licenses with AWS License Manager video.
When to Use T3 Dedicated Hosts
T3 Dedicated Hosts are ideally suited for small and medium databases, application servers, virtual desktops, and development/test environments. Similar to on-premises hypervisor hosts that allow CPU oversubscription, T3 Dedicated Hosts may not be suitable for workloads with correlated CPU burst patterns.
T3 Dedicated Hosts support all instance sizes in the T3 family, featuring various CPU and RAM ratios. Powered by the AWS Nitro System, they enable multiple instance sizes to run on a single host, accommodating up to 192 instances per T3 Dedicated Host, each capable of handling multiple processes. The maximum instance limits are outlined in the following table:
| Instance Family | Sockets | Physical Cores | nano | micro | small | medium | large | xlarge | 2xlarge |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| t3 | 2 | 48 | 192 | 192 | 192 | 192 | 96 | 48 | 24 |
You can run multiple combinations of T3 instance types, up to the host’s memory limit of 768GB. Examples of supported blended instance type combinations include:
- 168 t3.small and 24 t3.large
- 144 t3.small and 48 t3.large
- 24 t3.xlarge and 12 t3.2xlarge
Use Cases
If you are seeking ways to lower your licensing costs and host footprint to achieve the lowest TCO, T3 Dedicated Hosts provide previously unavailable scenarios to help you reach this goal. Their ability to run a greater number of instances per host compared to existing Dedicated Hosts directly translates to reduced licensing and infrastructure costs on AWS for suitable BYOL workloads.
Consider these three scenarios as typical examples of benefits available to customers using T3 Dedicated Hosts:
- Maintaining Existing Server Consolidation Ratios During Migration to AWS
On-premises, you benefit from oversubscribing your physical CPUs on VMware hosts, achieving high consolidation levels. By licensing Windows Server on a per-physical-core basis, you only need to license the physical cores of VMware hosts, not the vCPUs of Windows Server virtual machines.
For instance, if you operate 7 x 48 core VMware Hosts on-premises, each running 150 x 2 vCPU low average-CPU-utilization Windows Server virtual machines, and possess Windows Server Datacenter licenses eligible for BYOL to AWS, T3 Dedicated Hosts can help you maintain similar or better consolidation levels. Additionally, the number of Windows Server Datacenter licenses needed to migrate your workloads to AWS would decrease from 336 cores to 288 cores—resulting in a 14% savings.
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