EC2 Dedicated hosts

Question 1

What are the main characteristics of EC2 dedicated hosts?

Answer 1

• EC2 host allocated to you in its entirety.
• Pay for the host itself which is designed for a family of instances.
• There are no instance charges.
• You can pay for a host on-demand or reservation with 1 or 3 year terms.

Question 2

What defines how many instances you can run on the HW?

Answer 2

The host HW has physical sockets and cores and these influence how many instances you can run.

Question 3

What benefits related to licensing can you get by using dedicated hosts?

Answer 3

useful for SW licensing that goes attached to HW (you will allocate the license to some HW interface and then only pay for the dedicated host as instance chargues do not apply)

Question 4

Are hosts designed for a specific size and family of instances?

Answer 4

Yes. When you purchase one host, you configure what type of instances you want to run on it.

Question 5

Can you mix instance types?

Answer 5

Not with older VM systems.

New Nitro system allows for mixing and matching host size.

Question 6

Are there any main limitations when using dedicated hosts?

Answer 6

• AMI Limits, some versions can’t be used
• Amazon RDS instances are not supported
• Placement groups are not supported for dedicated hosts.
• Hosts can be shared with other organization accounts using the RAM product (resource access manager) - to share certain AWS products or services with other accounts.
• This is mostly used for licensing problems related to ports.
• Less flexibility on sizing.