Amazon Rolls Out Dedicated Physical Servers

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This article originally appeared at The WHIR

Amazon Web Services EC2 Dedicated Hosts has been released to general availability to help customers meet compliance and regulatory requirements and save on licensing fees, AWS announced on Monday. The service provides dedicated physical servers, along with the management and visibility tools to ensure granular control over which VM each application runs in.

Licenses for Windows Server, Oracle Database and other services often require specific servers and time periods, or servers with a certain number of sockets or physical cores, said AWS Chief Evangelist Jeff Barr.

“We want to make sure that you can continue to derive value from these licenses after you migrate to AWS,” Barr said in a blog post. “In general, we call this model Bring Your Own License, or BYOL. In order to do this while adhering to the terms of the license, you are going to need to control the mapping of the EC2 instances to the underlying, physical servers.”

Dedicated Hosts can run RHEL, Suse, Amazon Linux, Ubuntu, or Windows Server on over 30 variations of the M4, C3, C4, G2, R3, D2 and I2 instance types. Usage can be tracked through AWS Config to verify license and regulatory compliance.

The service is available on-demand, starting at $2.341 an hour for an M3 instance or $3.049 for an M4 instance in the US East region. The company says servers will be available by reservation soon, at discounts of up to 70 percent.

EC2 Dedicated Host is currently available in US, Europe, Asia-Pacific, and South America regions. The service allows 2 Dedicated Hosts per instance family per region, but more are available for the asking.

The EC2 Dedicated Hosts release was announced in October, but leasing dedicated servers on EC2 to return some of the control of on-premise hosting has been on Amazon’s radar for years. Amazon made clear at this year’s re:Invent that it wants to make cloud entry easier for companies with large data sets, and this move similarly addresses barriers for those whose services or data have physical storage requirements.

This first ran at http://www.thewhir.com/web-hosting-news/aws-users-can-bring-own-license-to-physical-server-under-ec2-dedicated-hosts-service