No license fees for migration
Google wants to give the possibility to customers running applications on Windows Server and wish to move to the cloud, migrate in earnest to Compute Engine, its IaaS service. Indeed, the Windows Server support Google Compute Engine, which was already in beta, has now reached general availability.
Windows Server 2012 and Windows Server 2008 R2 and Microsoft join Linux systems such as Ubuntu, Debian, Red Hat Enterprise Linux and SUSE in the list of OS supported by the cloud service Google. Support for Windows Server 2016 and Server on the Nano platform Compute Engine is also announced for the near future.
The Windows Server support means that developers can use the Google IaaS platform to manage their SQL Server applications, Exchange, SharePoint and other Microsoft applications running on Windows. With the general availability, "Windows Server instances are also covered by the SLA Compute Engine. Windows Server Users can now easily deploy an Active Directory server running ASP.NET or by using the cloud Launcher, and can safely extend their existing infrastructure using Google Cloud Platform VPN, "says the company in a blog post.
If Google considers as a premium Windows Server operating system on its platform, users should not pay any additional license fees for migration to Compute Engine. This is possible thanks to Microsoft License Mobility introduced by Google that allows customers to migrate your existing licenses of their Windows applications on the Cloud of the Mountain View company. In other words, Windows Application Site Licenses are valid Google Compute Engine.
To better support Windows Server, Google has also made over the past months many features to its virtualization stack. The firm cites for example the support generic recevoir offload (GRO) and multiple queue (MQ) that enable Windows Server to run on its cloud service with network performance ranging up 7,5Gbps. Google offers in addition, to facilitate migration, helping customers with new support plans.
The IT giant seeks through this effort to catch up with its competitors Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure IaaS market. It already saves SwiftPage, nGenX and IndependenceIT among the clients that run on Windows Server Compute Engine.