Now shipping: Windows Server 2016 images on Google Compute Engine

The content below is taken from the original (Now shipping: Windows Server 2016 images on Google Compute Engine), to continue reading please visit the site. Remember to respect the Author & Copyright.

Posted by Amruta Gulanikar, Product Manager

The Google Cloud Platform (GCP) team is working hard to make GCP the best environment to run enterprise Windows workloads. To that end, we’re happy to announce support for Windows Server 2016 Datacenter Edition, the latest version of Microsoft’s server operating system, on Google Compute Engine. Starting this week, you can launch instances with Google Compute Engine VM images with Microsoft Windows Server 2016 preinstalled. In addition, we now also support images for Microsoft SQL Server 2016 with Windows Server 2016. Specifically, we now support the following versions in GA:

  • Windows Server 2016 Datacenter Edition
  • SQL Server Standard 2016 with Windows Server 2016
  • SQL Server Web 2016 with Windows Server 2016
  • SQL Server Express 2016 with Windows Server 2016
  • SQL Server Standard (2012, 2014, 2016) with Windows Server 2012 R2
  • SQL Server Web (2012, 2014, 2016) with Windows Server 2012 R2
  • SQL Server Express (2012, 2014, 2016) with Windows Server 2012 R2
  • and coming soon, SQL Server Enterprise (2012, 2014, 2016) with Windows Server (2012, 2016)

Enterprise customers can leverage Windows Server 2016’s advanced multi-layer security, powerful storage and management capabilities and support for Windows containers. Windows runs on Google’s world-class infrastructure, with dramatic price-to-performance advantages, customizable VM sizes, and state-of-the-art networking and security capabilities. In addition, pricing for Windows Server 2016 and SQL Server 2016 remains the same as previous versions of both products.

Getting started

Sign up for a free trial to deploy your Windows applications and receive a $300 credit. Use this credit toward spinning up instances with pre-configured images for Windows Server, Microsoft SQL Server and your .NET applications. You can create instances directly from the Cloud Console or launch a solution for Windows Server from Cloud Launcher. Here’s the detailed documentation on how to create Microsoft Windows Server and SQL Server instances on GCP.

(click to enlarge)
(click to enlarge)

The team is continuing the momentum for Windows on GCP since we announced comprehensive .NET developer solutions back in August, including a .NET client library for all Cloud Platform APIs available through NuGet. The Cloud Platform team has hand-authored libraries for Cloud Platform APIs available as open source projects on GitHub to which the community continues to collaborate and add features. Learn how to build ASP.NET applications on GCP, or check out more resources on Windows Server and Microsoft SQL Server on GCP at http://bit.ly/2eEvqcE and http://bit.ly/2f1fDrG. If you need help migrating your Windows workloads, please contact the GCP team. We’re eager to hear your feedback!