Google’s customers can now launch Windows Server 2008 R2 Datacenter Edition instances on Compute Engine. They can also move Microsoft workloads to Google Cloud Platform through the License Mobility initiative.
Martin Buhr, senior product manager at Google announced the availability of Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2 Datacenter edition in beta on Google Compute Engine. Support for latest versions including Windows Server 2012 and 2012 R2 will be added in the future. Google Compute Engine recently added VPN support and peering making it possible to run hybrid application on its cloud. With the addition of Microsoft Windows OS to its supported operating system images, Google is trying to attract enterprise customers.
Google is the latest IaaS provider to support Microsoft License Mobility program. Amazon Web Services and Rackspace, Microsoft Azure enable Microsoft Windows based workloads like SQL Server, SharePoint and Exchange server licenses to be extended to the cloud. Enterprise customers with valid licenses can deploy these workloads on the cloud without paying additional license fee.
The following Microsoft server products are eligible for license mobility -
- MS Exchange Server
- SharePoint Server
- SQL Server Standard Edition
- SQL Server Enterprise Edition
- Lync Server
- System Center Server
- Dynamics CRM Server
- Dynamics AX Server
- MS Project Server
- Visual Studio Deployment
- Visual Studio Team Foundation Server
- BizTalk Server
- Forefront Identity Manager
- Forefront Unified Access Gateway
- Remote Desktop Services
More details on Microsoft License Mobility for Google Cloud Platform can be found here.
Google is also opening up the Chrome RDP application from Fusion Labs for free. Through this, customers can connect to Microsoft Windows Server instances from Chrome browser without the need to use 3rd party software. Google Developers Console stores and passes the login for Windows instance credentials to the RDP app. This provides one-click access to running Windows instances running on Google Compute Engine.
IndependenceIT, a Desktop as a Service (DaaS) provider is testing their stack called Cloud Workspace Suite on Google Compute Engine. This opens up opportunities to run workstations and desktops on Google Cloud.