Google Rolls Out Windows Server 2012 R2 Support to Its Compute Platform

With Windows Server 2003 support expiring on Tuesday this week, many companies are still scrambling to figure out how best to get to a supported platform. Microsoft, of course, hopes you'll choose Windows Server 2012 R2, which is probably the company's best server OS in a long time. Windows Server 2012 R2 was architected from the ground up as a Hybrid Cloud enabler, allowing companies to take advantage of as little or as much of its Azure services as needed, but still supply a solid private datacenter provider.

The day that Windows Server 2003 expired, Google was on tap to offer holdouts an opportunity to take advantage of its compute services for migrations. In preview for a number of months, Compute Engine now offers full Windows Server 2012 R2 support, releasing for General Availability.

In the many months in beta, the company reportedly made several Windows-specific improvements to the Compute Engine virtualization stack in order to bring the full benefits of Google network to Windows Server users.

The public offering provides multi queue (MQ) and generic receive offload (GRO) support, allowing Windows Server running on Compute Engine to reach up to 7.5Gbps of throughput.  This means that a smaller number of Windows Server instances are required, helping to reduce the costs for infrastructure and operations.

Here's the current list of server OS supported by the Google Compute Engine:

 For more information about Google Compute Engine, see: https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/