SQL Server licensing on AWS

Sign in and load the price helper from Lesson 40:

cd C:\aws-lab
aws login --profile saat-admin
$env:AWS_PROFILE = 'saat-admin'
$v = Get-Content C:\aws-lab\saat-vpc.json | ConvertFrom-Json
function Get-OnDemandPrice([string]$Service, [string[]]$Filters) {
  $f = $Filters | ForEach-Object { $k, $val = $_ -split '=', 2; "Type=TERM_MATCH,Field=$k,Value=$val" }
  $list = aws pricing get-products --region us-east-1 --service-code $Service --filters $f --max-items 1 --query PriceList --output json | ConvertFrom-Json
  if (-not $list) { return $null }
  $p = $list[0] | ConvertFrom-Json
  $od = @($p.terms.OnDemand.PSObject.Properties.Value)[0]
  [double](@($od.priceDimensions.PSObject.Properties.Value)[0].pricePerUnit.USD)
}

1Find the licence share of an EC2 price

Paste this whole block. It prices one size with each SQL edition:

$common = @('regionCode=ap-south-1', 'instanceType=r6i.xlarge', 'operatingSystem=Windows', 'tenancy=Shared', 'capacitystatus=Used', 'licenseModel=No License required')
$base = Get-OnDemandPrice AmazonEC2 ($common + 'preInstalledSw=NA')
$prices = foreach ($sw in 'NA', 'SQL Web', 'SQL Std', 'SQL Ent') {
  $p = Get-OnDemandPrice AmazonEC2 ($common + "preInstalledSw=$sw")
  $label = if ($sw -eq 'NA') { 'Windows only' } else { "Windows + $sw" }
  [pscustomobject]@{ Option = "EC2 r6i.xlarge $label"; USDPerHour = [math]::Round($p, 3); SqlLicencePerHour = [math]::Round($p - $base, 3) }
}
$prices | Format-Table -AutoSize

You should see something like this (prices change over time):

Option                         USDPerHour SqlLicencePerHour
------                         ---------- -----------------
EC2 r6i.xlarge Windows only         0.436             0
EC2 r6i.xlarge Windows + SQL Web    0.528         0.092
EC2 r6i.xlarge Windows + SQL Std    0.916          0.48
EC2 r6i.xlarge Windows + SQL Ent    1.936           1.5

On 4 vCPUs, Standard roughly doubles the Windows price and Enterprise more than quadruples it. The licence part grows with every vCPU, so a server twice as big doubles that column too. Run the same idea for RDS to see similar gaps between editions.

2Find the right Windows+SQL images

Paste this whole block. AWS publishes license-included images as public parameters:

aws ssm get-parameters-by-path --path /aws/service/ami-windows-latest --query "Parameters[?contains(Name, 'Server-2022-English-Full-SQL_2022')].Name" --output text

You should see something like this:

/aws/service/ami-windows-latest/Windows_Server-2022-English-Full-SQL_2022_Enterprise
/aws/service/ami-windows-latest/Windows_Server-2022-English-Full-SQL_2022_Express
/aws/service/ami-windows-latest/Windows_Server-2022-English-Full-SQL_2022_Standard
/aws/service/ami-windows-latest/Windows_Server-2022-English-Full-SQL_2022_Web

Launching from one of these images is what makes an EC2 instance license-included for SQL Server; the billing follows the image. For BYOL you’d start from a plain Windows image and install your own media.

3Check Optimize CPU options on RDS and EC2

Paste this whole block:

$v22 = aws rds describe-db-engine-versions --engine sqlserver-se --query "DBEngineVersions[?starts_with(EngineVersion, '16.00')] | [-1].EngineVersion" --output text
aws rds describe-orderable-db-instance-options --engine sqlserver-se --engine-version $v22 --db-instance-class db.r7i.4xlarge --query "OrderableDBInstanceOptions[0].AvailableProcessorFeatures[?Name=='coreCount'].AllowedValues" --output text
aws ec2 describe-instance-types --instance-types r7i.4xlarge --query "InstanceTypes[0].[VCpuInfo.DefaultVCpus,MemoryInfo.SizeInMiB,join(',', to_array(VCpuInfo.ValidCores[].to_string(@)))]" --output text

You should see something like this:

1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8
16      131072  1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8

Both RDS and EC2 let an r7i.4xlarge run with fewer cores while keeping its full 128 GiB of memory. With 2 cores and 2 threads per core you license 4 vCPUs instead of 16.

4Write down the decision

For each database, record: edition really needed (Enterprise features in use?), licence model, vCPUs actually needed, and whether Optimize CPU applies. Here’s a quick check of Enterprise-only features to run on a source server, saved for later:

@'
-- Edition-features.sql: Enterprise-only features each database uses
SELECT feature_name, feature_id FROM sys.dm_db_persisted_sku_features;
'@ | Set-Content C:\aws-lab\Edition-features.sql
Get-Content C:\aws-lab\Edition-features.sql | Select-Object -Last 1

You should see this:

SELECT feature_name, feature_id FROM sys.dm_db_persisted_sku_features;

Run it in each database (for example with sqlcmd -d DBNAME). No rows means nothing in that database ties it to Enterprise, and Standard may be enough.

✅ Checkpoint: You calculated the SQL licence share for each edition, found the license-included image names, saw the allowed core counts for Optimize CPU, and saved Edition-features.sql.