If you would like to read the other parts in this article series please go to:
- Microsoft + AWS: A Winning Combo (Part 2)
- Microsoft + AWS: A Winning Combo (Part 3)
- Microsoft + AWS: A Winning Combo (Part 4)
- Microsoft + AWS: A Winning Combo (Part 5)
Introduction
At first thought, someone with only a passing knowledge of the state of the cloud computing art might consider Microsoft and Amazon to be nothing but fierce competitors in the Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) space. They are that; Microsoft’s Azure seeks to capture the same customer base as Amazon Web Services’ EC2, and Gartner’s 2014 Cloud Infrastructure as a Service Magic Quadrant showed the two companies as the only leaders in that space (with Amazon out ahead by quite a margin).
However, on another level the two make a great combination. Microsoft’s product line includes something that Amazon’s doesn’t (at least yet): established and proven server operating systems and widely-used server applications. Pretty much all of those run nicely on top of AWS.
Windows Server on AWS
Amazon makes it easy to do, by providing EC2 customers with pre-configured AWS machine images that they call AMIs, which can run one of several different versions of Windows Server. One of the options is Windows Server with SQL Server for those whose applications depend on an SQL database. A big plus is the fact that the AMI includes the licensing for the Windows OS software, so you don’t have to worry about that.
Available AMIs include:
- Windows Server 2012 R2
- Windows Server 2012 R2 with SQL Server Standard, Express or Web 2014
- Windows Server 2012
- Windows Server 2012 with SQL Server Standard, Express or Web 2014
- Windows Server 2008 R2
- Windows Server 2008 R2 with SQL Server Standard 2012 or 2008
- Windows Server 2008 R2 with SQL Server Express and Internet Information Services
- Windows Server 2008 32 or 64 bit
- Windows Server 2008 with SQL Server Standard 2008 or SQL Server Express and IIS
- Windows Server 2003 R2 32 or 64 bit
- Windows Server 2003 R2 with SQL Server Standard or SQL Server Express and IIS
Microsoft server applications and License Mobility
As for the server applications, Amazon is an Authorized License Mobility Partner. Microsoft License Mobility makes it possible for you to use your existing application licenses that you’re using for your on-premises servers when you move certain eligible server applications to an AWS virtual machine. This applies to you if you have Microsoft Volume Licensing with active Software Assurance contracts.
To take advantage of the License Mobility feature, you have to go through a process whereby Microsoft checks the validity of your licenses. This entails filling out a form to provide the following information:
- Name of your organization (must match Microsoft Volume Licensing Agreement)
- Type of Agreement
- Agreement number
- Agreement’s enrollment number
- Software Assurance expiration date(s)
- Number of licenses on the enrollment
- Name, web address and email info for the Authorized Mobility Partner (Amazon AWS)
- Number of licenses you want to deploy with License Mobility
(Hey, we are talking about Microsoft licensing here – you didn’t think it was going to be completely painless, did you?) If you need help in completing the verification form, you can find a guidance document here.
Eligible agreement types include:
- Enterprise Agreement
- Enterprise Subscription Agreement
- Open Value Agreement (with Software Assurance)
- Open License (with optional Software Assurance)
- Select Plus (with optional Software Assurance)
The server applications that are eligible for migration with an existing license under the Microsoft License Mobility program include the following:
- Microsoft Exchange Server
- SharePoint Server
- SQL Server, Standard or Enterprise Edition
- Lync Server
- System Center Server
- Dynamics CRM and AX Servers
- Microsoft Project Server
- Visual Studio Deployment and Team Foundation Server
- BizTalk Server
- Forefront Identity Manager (FIM)
- Forefront Unified Access Gateway (UAG)
- Remote Desktop Services
This does not include the Client Access Licenses (CALs). Customers have to maintain the required CALs. The License Mobility program doesn’t apply to the operating system (server or client) nor to desktop applications such as Microsoft Office.
Deployment scenarios
With all of the options discussed above, you can deploy Windows Server and Microsoft server applications in a wide range of use case scenarios, including the following:
- Web site and web service hosting
- Windows application hosting
- ASP.NET application hosting
- Data processing
- Media transcoding
- Distributed testing
Whatever the use case, when you run Windows Server operating systems and applications on AWS, you get integration with other Amazon EC2 features. These include:
- Amazon Elastic Block Storage (EBS), which gives you persistent block level storage volumes to use with EC2 instances.
- Amazon CloudWatch, the monitoring and metrics tracking service for AWS cloud resources and applications running on EC2 instances.
- Elastic Load Balancing, which automatically distributes incoming application traffic across multiple EC2 instances for better fault tolerance.
- Elastic IP addresses, which are static IP addresses that are associated with your account rather than a particular EC2 instance, which you can remap to any instance associated with your account.
The EC2 infrastructure for Windows
The AMIs are designed around the most commonly used software configurations and function as templates. You aren’t limited to just the popular AMIs that Amazon makes available. You can also build your own customized AMIs. You can launch multiple instances, of different types, from one AMI. Each instance is a copy of the AMI that runs in a virtual machine.
What do we mean by different types of instances, you might be wondering. The instance type, in this context, refers to the hardware specs – such as the compute and memory capabilities – so you need to be sure that you’ve selected an instance type that has the amount of memory and processing power that’s needed for whatever applications you want to run on the Windows operating system on that particular instance.
Amazon divides the instance types into the following categories:
- T2 instances, which are burstable performance instances. They give you a baseline CPU performance and you can “burst” above that baseline if you occasionally need the additional performance. CPU credits are accrued when the processor is idle and are used when it’s active. You can use the accrued credits to burst to full processor performance for one minute per credit.
- M3 instances, which offer fixed performance levels that balance processing, memory and network resources and are good for small and medium sized databases, running SharePoint and other applications, and data processing.
- C3 instances are optimized for high performance processing (compute optimized) and are good for web servers, distributed analytics, and high performance applications as well as MMO gaming and video encoding.
- R3 instances are optimized for applications that require a large amount of memory such as SharePoint and other applications, distributed memory caches, in-memory analytics and high performance databases.
- G2 instances are Graphic Processing Unit (GPU) optimized for graphics, game streaming, video encoding, 3D application streaming and other GPU intensive applications.
- I2 instances are optimized for storage performance with very fast SSDs and are appropriate for NoSQL databases, transactional databases, data warehousing, Hadoop and cluster file systems.
- HS1 instances provide high storage density and high sequential read and write performance and also work well for data warehousing, Hadoop/MapReduce, and parallel file systems.
AWS also offers options such as EBS optimized instances, enhanced networking for higher packet per second performance and lower latency, cluster networking, multiple storage options, and dedicated instances that run on single tenant hardware.
The Windows instances that you launch will keep running until you stop them, and there is a limit to the number of instances that you can have running at the same time. In general, you can’t run more than 20 on-demand instances, 20 reserved instances and 5 spot instances per region. Some types of instances have lower limits.
It is possible to get more instances allocated if you need them, by filling out an instance request form. Amazon doesn’t guarantee that your request will be granted.
Summary
Amazon’s AWS provides a solid cloud platform for running any of the currently supported versions of Windows Server, and a wide variety of Microsoft server applications that can be migrated from your on-premises data center to the Amazon cloud with minimal hassle factor, thanks to Microsoft’s License Mobility program – if your organization has a verified volume licensing agreement that’s eligible.
Your Windows servers run on EC2 instances of different types that are optimized to provide the best environment for the particular type of computing and applications you want to run. This takes much of the administrative overhead out of it and leaves you more time to focus on supporting your users.
In Part 2 of this series, we’ll continue the discussion of how to run Windows servers and applications on AWS and how to get the most bang for your buck out of this Microsoft/Amazon combination.
If you would like to read the other parts in this article series please go to:
