Microsoft Workloads on AWS

Category: Amazon EC2

Convert licenses of SQL Servers migrated with AWS Application Migration Service

In this blog post, I will show you how to convert Microsoft SQL Server licenses to an AWS provided license included using post-launch settings in the AWS Application Migration Service (AWS MGN). When you are migrating your SQL Servers to Amazon Web Services (AWS), you have a variety of options for using new and existing […]

Optimizing large-scale migration of SQL Server databases to Amazon EC2 using backup metadata

In this blog post, we explore how the Microsoft SQL Server backup metadata, known as backup headers, can be leveraged when migrating from on premises to Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2). This technique is particularly useful when access to source database information is non-existent or only backup files are available with no access to […]

How to generate TLS certificates for a highly available Remote Desktop Gateway Farm

Introduction In this blog post, I am going to show you how to generate, import, test, and troubleshoot a properly created Transport Layer Security (TLS) certificate for a Remote Desktop Gateway (RD Gateway) farm. Secure management of your Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances for Microsoft Windows Server is a top priority for any […]

Migrate SQL Server databases to AWS with minimal downtime using AWS Migration Hub Orchestrator

In this blog post, we will show you how to configure AWS Migration Hub Orchestrator using the recently-launched support for transactional log backups to reduce downtime during Microsoft SQL Server database migrations to Amazon Web Services (AWS). Customers worldwide trust AWS to run their mission-critical SQL Server databases. For SQL Server databases that are still […]

How to migrate a large-scale SQL Server database over low bandwidth using AWS Application Migration Service

In this blog post, we will demonstrate how to migrate a Microsoft SQL Server database on a low bandwidth network using AWS Application Migration Service (AWS MGN), AWS Snowcone, and SQL Server Log Shipping technology. Customers use different migration strategies to lift-and-shift their on-premises SQL Server workloads to the AWS Cloud. One of those approaches […]

Automate rotating IAM credentials for SQL Server backups to Amazon S3

In this blog post, we will look at how to automate the rotation of the AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) credentials synchronized with Microsoft SQL Server credentials to meet password rotation requirements. Solution overview The IAM Access key and Secret access key are used to create a SQL Server credential; therefore, to rotate the […]

Year in review 2023: AWS for Microsoft workloads

Year in review 2023: AWS for Microsoft workloads

Celebrating 15 years of running Microsoft workloads in the cloud, longer than any other major cloud provider Before we wrap up 2023, I wanted to capture some of the highlights of the year—so I reached out to my esteemed colleague, Rajesh Rathod. Rajesh is an Amazon Elastic Cloud Compute (Amazon EC2) product leader who has […]

How to manually downgrade SQL Server Enterprise edition to Developer edition on AWS and save on licensing costs

In this blog post, we will show you how to downgrade Microsoft SQL Server instances from Enterprise edition to Developer edition on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances. This post is especially useful if there are a single digit number of SQL Server instances to be downgraded. In our next blog post, we will […]

How to deploy Extended Security Updates for Windows Server 2012 on Amazon EC2 with AWS Systems Manager

In this blog post, I will guide you through the procedure necessary to prepare your Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) workloads to receive Extended Security Updates (ESU) purchased from Microsoft. This is achieved by utilizing the Patch Manager and Run Command capabilities of AWS Systems Manager. Windows Server users are familiar with Microsoft’s regular […]

Optimizing protocol selection when using Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP for Microsoft SQL Server

In this blog post, we will review advantages and disadvantages of the two storage access protocols, iSCSI and SMB, offered by Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP (FSx for ONTAP). For comparison purposes, we will use Microsoft SQL Server on Windows. We will provide recommendations for selecting the optimal storage access protocol for your specific scenario. […]