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Expanded Windows Support on Google Cloud Platform
Monday, December 8, 2014
Our customers, large and small, have put a number of things on their holiday wish lists, including better support of their Windows-based workloads, leveraging the performance and scale of Google datacenters. Today, we're releasing three additional enhancements to Google Compute Engine that make it a great place for customers to run highly performant Windows-based workloads at scale.
First, we’re happy to offer Microsoft License Mobility for Google Cloud Platform. This enables our customers to move their existing Microsoft server application software licenses, such as SQL Server, SharePoint and Exchange Server, from on-premises to Google Cloud Platform without any additional Microsoft software licensing fees. Not only does license mobility make the transition easier for existing customers, it provides customers who prefer to purchase perpetual licenses the ability to continue doing so while still taking advantage of the efficiencies of the cloud. You can learn more about Microsoft License Mobility for Google Cloud Platform
here
. Use of Microsoft products on Google Compute Engine is subject to additional terms and conditions (you can view the Google Cloud Platform service terms
here
).
Second, Windows Server 2008 R2 Datacenter Edition is now available to all Google Cloud Platform customers in beta on Google Compute Engine. We know our customers run some of their key workloads on Windows and want rapid deployment, high performance and the ability to stretch their datacenters to the cloud. And with awesome features like
Local SSD
(which also supports live migration), and multiple ways to
connect your datacenter
to the cloud, Google Cloud Platform is the best place to run your Windows workloads. And just so you know, we are working on support for Windows Server 2012 and 2012 R2, we’ll have more on this soon!
And lastly, a version of the the popular Chrome RDP
app
from
Fusion Labs
optimized for Google Cloud Platform is now available for free to our customers for use with Windows in Google Compute Engine. This enables customers using the Chrome browser to create remote desktop sessions to their Windows instances in Google Compute Engine without the need for additional software by simply clicking on the RDP button in the Google Developer Console. In addition, because Google Developers Console stores and passes the login for the Windows credentials to the RDP app, customers are able to leave the complexity of managing unique user IDs and passwords for each Windows instance to Google.
We’re constantly amazed to see what our customers build and run on Google Cloud Platform, from high performance animated movie rendering to rapid scale distributed applications to near instant-on VMs to cloud bursting.
For example, IndependenceIT, a leading software provider of simplified IT management solutions for application and DaaS delivery, has been working to certify its Cloud Workspace Suite ("CWS") with Windows Server 2008 R2 Datacenter Edition running on Google Compute Engine. CWS is software that allows IT administrators to rapidly orchestrate and provision all elements necessary for automated, multi-platform, hypervisor/device agnostic workspaces for use with public, private or hybrid-cloud IT environments. The software offers a robust API set for ease of integration with existing customer business support systems, simplifying deployment while speeding time to market. IndependenceIT has been testing Windows on Google Compute Engine, and their customers will have the ability to use CWS to provision Windows Server based desktops and application deployments into Google Cloud Platform.
We’d love to hear feedback from our customers who use Windows, as well as how you’d like to see us expand support for the Windows ecosystem. What are you building next?
-Posted by Martin Buhr, Product Manager
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