Services or capabilities described in Amazon Web Services documentation might vary by Region. To see the differences applicable to the China Regions, see Getting Started with Amazon Web Services in China (PDF).

Bring Your Own Windows desktop licenses in WorkSpaces

If your licensing agreement with Microsoft allows it, you can use your Windows 10 Enterprise or Windows 10 Pro desktop licenses for your WorkSpaces. To do this, you must Bring Your Own License (BYOL) and provide a Windows 10 license that meets the following requirements. For more information about using Microsoft software on Amazon, see Amazon Web Services and Microsoft.

To stay compliant with Microsoft licensing terms, Amazon runs your BYOL WorkSpaces on hardware that is dedicated to you in the Amazon Cloud. By bringing your own license, you can provide a consistent experience for your users. For more information, see WorkSpaces Pricing.

Using Amazon EC2 Image Builder (Windows 11 only)

If you are using Windows 11, you can choose to use Amazon EC2 Image Builder to import and create your BYOL image for WorkSpaces. To do this, you use Amazon EC2 Image Builder in place of:

For more information, see Amazon EC2 Image Builder User Guide.

Windows versions supported for BYOL

Your VM must run one of the following Windows versions:

All supported OS versions support all of the compute types available in the Amazon Region where you're using WorkSpaces. Versions of Windows that are no longer supported by Microsoft are not guaranteed to work and are not supported by Amazon Support.

Videos on uploading and creating BYOL images

For a demonstration on uploading BYOL images, watch the following videos.

For a demonstration on creating BYOL images with Microsoft Hyper-V, watch the following video.

For a demonstration on creating BYOL images with VMware Workstation, watch the following video.

Link BYOL accounts in WorkSpaces

You can use BYOL linking to link accounts and share BYOL configurations. BYOL configurations include the CIDR range used by your accounts and the images you use to create WorkSpaces with your Windows license. All accounts that are linked share the same underlying hardware infrastructure.

The account enabled for BYOL linking is the primary owner of the underlying hardware infrastructure, and is called the Source account. The Source account manages access to the underlying hardware infrastructure. Target accounts are the accounts that are linked to the Source account.