News

Windows Server 2016 Images Available on Google Compute Engine

• By Kurt Mackie
• 10/25/2016

The Google Cloud Platform (GCP) team, seeking to make it the best environment in which to run enterprise Windows workloads, announced support for Windows Server 2016 Datacenter Edition, the latest version of Microsoft's server OS, on Google Compute Engine.

"Starting this week, you can launch instances with Google Compute Engine VM images with Microsoft Windows Server 2016 preinstalled," Google said in a blog post Monday. "In addition, we now also support images for Microsoft SQL Server 2016 with Windows Server 2016."

Instances running SQL Server 2016 editions also are available, although the Enterprise edition is yet to come. There are older SQL Server offerings, too, such as SQL Server 2012 and SQL Server 2014 instances. However, the Enterprise editions of SQL Server 2012 and SQL Server 2014 aren't available quite yet, according to Google's announcement. The Google Cloud Platform also supports Microsoft .NET developer solutions, such as ASP.NET.

Google bills by the minute for the Windows Server 2016 VMs, and only when they are used. It's possible to customize the compute instance in terms of memory and CPU. The VMs get created using Google's Cloud Launcher management solution or the "Cloud Platform Console."

It's also possible to use Microsoft's License Mobility for Google Cloud Platform program to move existing Windows Server-based application licenses under volume licensing agreements to Google's datacenter infrastructure, although Software Assurance is required. The applications servers that can be moved include Exchange Server, SharePoint Server and SQL Server, among others. The full list can be found here.

Google's public cloud support for Windows Server 2016 comes on the heels of Amazon's announcement last week that its Elastic Compute Cloud supports Windows Server 2016. And, of course, Microsoft offers Windows Server 2016 VMs as part of its own Azure datacenter offerings.