AWS Windows License-Included for ROSA w/ HCP hosts
Overview
With OpenShift Virtualization, running on a ROSA cluster, customers may wish to run Windows VMs. In order to be license-compliant with Microsoft Windows in AWS, the hosts (metal EC2 instances) running these VMs need to be enabled with AWS EC2 Windows License Included. This article describes the process to do this with your ROSA cluster.
Disclaimer
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**Using this capability will add additional costs to be incurred on your AWS billing. More specifically the full vcore count of your chosen machinepool instance type will be charged for Windows-Licence-Included fees.
Enabling this capability will affect AWS billing on your account and this will be your responsibility.
Billing issues should be directed to Amazon support. -
Red Hat does not take responsibility for your Microsoft Windows licensing and compliance validation. You must ensure you are in compliance with Microsoft and AWS requirements for the Microsoft licenses and associated costs.
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Even with included feature functionality related to CPU overcommit, it is entirely your (the customer's) responsibility to avoid overcommitting vcpu in your VMs.
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For more details, please consult Content from aws.amazon.com is not included.AWS documentation about Microsoft licensing on AWS.
Prerequisites
ROSA HCP standard prerequisites:
https://docs.redhat.com/en/documentation/red_hat_openshift_service_on_aws/4/html/install_rosa_with_hcp_clusters/index
Supported regions
All commercial AWS regions where ROSA is available.
rosa list regions
Supported ROSA versions
OCP 4.19+
Supported instance types
Bare metal instance types (x86-64 only)
Full list of supported instances can be found with
rosa list instance-types --hosted-cp --region <your region>
How to enable Windows LI
Step 1 - Create a cluster
Create a ROSA HCP cluster at OCP version 4.19 or higher.
Step 2 - Create a machinepool
Create a machinepool with a supported version and instance type with all the usual parameters and the additional flag of --type, which allows you to specify this particular MachinePool should be run and billed as Windows License Included
rosa create machinepool -c $clusterName --name $name \
--replicas=1 --instance-type=$BAREMETALINSTANCE --type=Windows \
#... any other parameter
Without this specific flag, machinepools will be created as usual (without any additional vcpu billing).
With this specific flag, the machinepool will have machines that are billed as Windows-LI, based on the number of vcpus in total in the machinepool.
Step 3 - Validate/verify
To check if your specific cluster node is enabled for Windows-License-Included,
- Gather the instance ID you wish to check.
- Run the following command with your instance ID and the ‘PlatformDetails” value will show if it is set for ‘Windows’.
aws ec2 describe-instances --query 'Reservations[].Instances[].{InstanceId:InstanceId, PlatformDetails:PlatformDetails, UsageOperation:UsageOperation, State:State.Name}' --output table --region us-west-2 --instance-id $instanceId
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
| DescribeInstances |
+---------------------+-------------------+----------+---------------------+
| InstanceId | PlatformDetails | State | UsageOperation |
+---------------------+-------------------+----------+---------------------+
| $instanceId | Windows | running | RunInstances:0002 |
+---------------------+-------------------+----------+---------------------+
At this point, you will have a AWS EC2 host (x86-64 metal instance) that has joined your ROSA w/ HCP cluster as a node with special metadata that you would run VMs within, using OpenShift Virtualization; those VMs can be Microsoft Windows based.
You will be billed by AWS for the full vcpu allocation of each Windows-LI-enabled host (bare-metal machine) in your cluster.
Be advised to remain within quota of each host.
Next steps would typically be to create OpenShift-Virtualization / CNV guest VMs.
Please see this article for details: https://access.redhat.com/solutions/7135149
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