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Dedicated Host:Common scenarios

Last Updated:Apr 01, 2026

Dedicated Host (DDH) provides single-tenant physical servers for workloads with strict compliance requirements, hardware-bound software licenses, or performance-sensitive applications.

Ensure strict security and compliance requirements

DDH is a single-tenant hosting service. The physical resources of each dedicated host are used by one tenant only, with dedicated hosts from different tenants isolated at the physical server level. Deploy ECS instances on a specified physical server to meet the runtime environment compliance requirements of specific services.

Maintain stable performance

Performance-sensitive industries such as gaming require exclusive access to all physical resources — CPUs, memory, and network interface controller (NIC) — without contention from neighboring tenants. DDH dedicates a full physical server to your workloads, delivering consistent computing performance and stable instance access.

Deploy hardware-bound licenses

If your software licenses are assigned based on CPU cores, CPU sockets, and virtual machines, bring them to DDH and continue using them under your existing license terms. Furthermore, you are still subject to the terms of the license. DDH keeps the underlying hardware unchanged, which prevents license failures caused by vMotion during live migration.

Supported licenses include, but are not limited to:

  • Windows Server

  • SQL Server

This eliminates the need to purchase new licenses when migrating to the cloud, reducing migration costs.

Automatic resource deployment

The automatic deployment feature lets you deploy ECS instances without specifying a host, or pin instances to a particular dedicated host. You can also:

  • View the topological relationships between ECS instances and physical servers

  • Migrate ECS instances between dedicated hosts as needed

This flexibility simplifies application orchestration across your dedicated host fleet.

Migrate virtual environments to the cloud

The CPU overprovisioned dedicated host type suits workloads with low CPU load, such as development, testing, and system O&M environments. Use it to migrate virtual environments — including OpenStack and KVM — from on-premises physical servers to the cloud at low cost.

For details on available host specifications, see Dedicated host types.