Amazon EVS now offers Microsoft Windows Server Licensing

Posted on: Apr 20, 2026

Today, we're announcing that Amazon Elastic VMware Service (Amazon EVS) now offers Microsoft Windows Server licensing entitlements. You can now migrate or create new virtual machines (VMs) running Windows Server OS in EVS and obtain Windows Server licensing entitlements for those VMs from AWS.

Amazon EVS lets you run VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) directly within your Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) on EC2 bare-metal instances, powered by AWS Nitro. Using either our step-by-step configuration workflow or the AWS Command Line Interface (CLI), you can set up a complete VCF environment in just a few hours. This rapid deployment enables faster workload migration to AWS, helping you eliminate aging infrastructure, reduce operational risks, and meet critical timelines for exiting your data center.

With this latest functionality, you can now entitle your Windows Server VMs on Amazon EVS with Microsoft Windows Server. You can configure an EVS connector to your VMware vCenter Server and provide the VM IDs for those Window Server VMs you want to entitle through the Amazon EVS console or AWS CLI. Pay for only what your VMs use, on a per vCPU-hour basis. Add or remove entitlement for your VMs at any time, giving you flexibility to manage costs as your environment evolves.  This newest release provides you with greater flexibility when migrating to AWS, helping meet critical data center exit timelines while maintaining your familiar VMware environment. 

This feature is available in all AWS Regions where Amazon EVS is available.

For more details, read the step-by-step walkthrough on the blog post. Visit the Amazon EVS product detail page and user guide. to learn more about Amazon EVS.