Host maintenance for Amazon EC2 Dedicated Host - Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud

Host maintenance for Amazon EC2 Dedicated Host

With host maintenance, in the rare event that a Dedicated Host becomes degraded, we automatically migrate supported instances running on it onto a healthy replacement Dedicated Host. This helps to minimize your workload's downtime and simplify the management of your Dedicated Hosts. Host maintenance is also performed for planned and routine Amazon EC2 maintenance.

Amazon EC2 supports two types of host maintenance:

  • Live migration host maintenance — instances are automatically migrated to the replacement host within 24 hours, without stopping and restarting them.

  • Reboot-based host maintenance — instances are scheduled for instance reboot scheduled events, during which they are automatically stopped and restarted on the replacement host.

Host maintenance versus host recovery

The following table shows the main differences between host recovery and host maintenance.

Host recovery Host maintenance
Instance reachability Unreachable Reachable
Dedicated Host state under-assessment permanent-failure
Host resource group Supported Not supported

For more information about host recovery, see Host recovery.

Considerations

  • Host maintenance is available in all AWS Regions, except the China Regions and AWS GovCloud (US) Regions.

  • Host maintenance is not supported in AWS Outposts, AWS Local Zones, and AWS Wavelength Zones.

  • Host maintenance cannot be turned on or off for hosts already within a host resource group. Hosts added to a host resource group retain their host maintenance setting. For more information, see Host resource groups.

  • Host maintenance is not supported with instance types that have instance store-backed root volumes.

Dedicated Host integrates with AWS License Manager—Tracks licenses across your Amazon EC2 Dedicated Hosts (supported only in Regions in which AWS License Manager is available). For more information, see the AWS License Manager User Guide.

You must have sufficient licenses in your AWS account for your new Dedicated Host. The licenses associated with your degraded host are released when the host is released after the completion of the scheduled event.

Pricing

There are no additional charges for using host maintenance, but the usual Dedicated Host charges apply. For more information, see Amazon EC2 Dedicated Hosts Pricing.

As soon as host maintenance is initiated, you are no longer billed for the degraded Dedicated Host. Billing for the replacement Dedicated Host begins only after it enters the available state.

If the degraded Dedicated Host was billed using the On-Demand rate, the replacement Dedicated Host is also billed using the On-Demand rate. If the degraded Dedicated Host had an active Dedicated Host Reservation, it is transferred to the new Dedicated Host.