Available on AWS: Amazon EC2 for Microsoft Windows Server with SQL Server Enterprise Edition

Below is a guest post from Bonnie Donovan, Microsoft Channel Manager at AWS, regarding some recent updates regarding SQL Server Enterprise Edition on AWS. 

AWS recently announced Amazon EC2 for Microsoft Windows Server with SQL Server Enterprise Edition. SQL Server enables you to build mission-critical applications and Big Data solutions using high-performance, in-memory technology across OLTP, data warehousing, business intelligence and analytics workloads. There are pre-configured Amazon Machine Images (AMI) available for launch on R3.2xlarge, R3.4xlarge, and R3.8xlarge instance types, in the US-East (Virginia), US-West (Oregon) and Europe (Ireland) regions.

Many customers have requirements that require the SQL Server Enterprise version.  Microsoft SQL Server Enterprise Edition offers a number of new features, including:

• “AlwaysOn” high availability: You can configure up to four active, readable secondaries
• Self-service business intelligence: You can use Power View to conduct interactive data exploration and visualization
• Data Quality Services: You can use organizational and 3rd party reference data to profile, cleanse and match data

Customers can continue to bring their existing SQL Server Enterprise Licenses to AWS leveraging Microsoft’s License Mobility Program, but some customers prefer to purchase directly from AWS, as this offers you the flexibility to run a database server for as much or as little time as you need. All SQL Server versions that we offer integrate with Amazon EBS, enabling you to take advantage of the persistence, performance, and reliability of Amazon EBS for all your databases.

You can visit our web site to learn more about our AMI’s with SQL Server Enterprise Edition pre-installed, the R3 Instance type, and pricing. To get started, you can select and launch an EC2 for Windows AMI with SQL Server Enterprise Edition from within the AWS Management Console, or you can purchase directly from the AWS Marketplace (Microsoft SQL Server Enterprise Edition 2012 and 2014).

In addition to the having the ability to run Amazon EC2 for Windows with SQL Server Enterprise Edition, you can now run SQL Server Enterprise Edition as a License Included offering on Amazon RDS. In the License Included service model, customers do not need separately purchased Microsoft SQL Server licenses. License Included pricing is inclusive of software license, underlying hardware resources, and Amazon RDS management capabilities. This allows customers to pay only for the hours they use and change their instance type as needed to fit their workloads.  The new License Included offering is in addition to the Bring Your Own License offering for SQL Server Enterprise Edition already available on Amazon RDS.

The Amazon RDS for SQL Server Enterprise Edition offers a number of features including High Availability using Multi-AZ, database storage sizes up to 4TB, and storage performance with up to 20,000 input/output operations per second (IOPS). To create a new Amazon RDS for SQL Server Enterprise Edition instance with just a few clicks, use the “Launch DB Instance” wizard in the AWS Management Console and select SQL Server Enterprise Edition and License Included options. Learn more by visiting the Amazon RDS Pricing page.