Alibaba Cloud provides the software license feature that allows you to purchase software licenses for existing Elastic Compute Service (ECS) instances running specific operating systems, such as Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES). This topic describes the application scope of software licenses and how to buy them through Alibaba Cloud.
Application scope and scenarios
The software license feature is in invitational preview. To use the feature, contact your sales manager.
License name | Supported operating system that can be activated by the license | Scenario |
Red Hat Enterprise Linux | CentOS 7 and 8 | If you want to convert the operating system of an ECS instance from CentOS 7 to RHEL 7 after CentOS reached its end of life (EOL), you must purchase this license before you can download the RHEL software and complete the conversion. |
RHEL 7, 8, and 9 | If you migrate your instance from an on-premises environment or another cloud platform to Alibaba Cloud as an RHEL instance, purchase this license to continue receiving RHEL image updates and after-sales support. Note If your instance runs a Red Hat image purchased from Alibaba Cloud, the image already has this license, and you do not need to purchase one. | |
Red Hat Enterprise Linux Extended Lifecycle Support | RHEL 7.9 | The Red Hat Enterprise Linux Extended Life Cycle Support (RHEL ELS) Add-on subscription is released by Red Hat for extended life support. The subscription provides you with critical and important security bug fixes and specific emergency bug fixes, which mitigates security risks in the ELS phase. Important
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SUSE Linux Enterprise Server | SLES 12 and 15 | If you migrate your instance from an on-premises environment or another cloud platform to Alibaba Cloud as a SUSE instance, purchase a SUSE license to continue receiving SUSE image updates and after-sales support. |
SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for SAP | SLES for SAP 12 and 15 |
Billing
The operating system license on an ECS instance is bound to the instance. When you purchase an operating system license for an ECS instance, take note of the following items:
For a subscription ECS instance, you are charged operating system license fees for the remaining subscription period of the instance.
For a pay-as-you-go ECS instance, billing starts for the operating system license at the point in time when the license is purchased.
The following section describes the unit price details of each software license. Click the pane to view the price details.
Unit price details for ECS instance software licenses
Prerequisites
To ensure that you can activate a software license on an ECS instance after you purchase the license for it, make sure that the following conditions are met:
The instance resides in a virtual private cloud (VPC). If the instance resides in the classic network, migrate the instance from the classic network to a VPC before you purchase the software license. If you have any issues with this, submit a ticket.
Cloud Assistant Agent is installed and Cloud Assistant is in the Normal state on the instance.
If you log on as a Resource Access Management (RAM) user, the owner of the Alibaba Cloud account to which the RAM user belongs already grants the RAM user the System policies for OOS permission to access CloudOps Orchestration Service (OOS) resources. For more information, see Grant permissions to a RAM user.
Procedure
In the top navigation bar, select the region and resource group of the resource that you want to manage.
Click Purchase Software License. In the dialog box that appears, select a software name from the Licensed Product Name drop-down list and ECS instances in the ECS Instances section.
ECS instances that are not eligible for purchasing a software license are grayed out and unselectable. An ECS instance must meet the following requirements to be eligible for a software license:
The instance cannot have an existing paid order for the software license.
The operating system of the instance must be supported and can be activated by the software license.
Click Purchase and Activate. Follow the on-screen instructions to complete the payment and create an activation task.
NoteDuring the activation process, only the activation configuration is issued. The selected ECS instances are not restarted.
On the Software Licenses page, check the status of the activation task in the Most Recent Activation Task column.
If the activation task fails, identify and resolve the issue, and then click Activate in the Actions column to re-create the activation task.