Google announced expanded Windows Support for its Cloud Platform. This comes in the form of Microsoft License Mobility, Windows Server 2008 R2 Datacenter Edition availability, and an optimized version of the Chrome RDP app for Windows.

Microsoft License Mobility for Google Cloud Platform lets users move their existing Microsoft server application software licenses (like SQL Server, SharePoint and Exchange Server) from on-premises to Google Cloud Platform without any additional Microsoft software licensing fees.

“Second, Windows Server 2008 R2 Datacenter Edition is now available to all Google Cloud Platform customers in beta on Google Compute Engine,” says product manager Martin Buhr. “We know our customers run some of their key workloads on Windows and want rapid deployment, high performance and the ability to stretch their datacenters to the cloud. And with awesome features like Local SSD (which also supports live migration), and multiple ways to connect your datacenter to the cloud, Google Cloud Platform is the best place to run your Windows workloads. And just so you know, we are working on support for Windows Server 2012 and 2012 R2, we’ll have more on this soon!”

“And lastly, a version of the the popular Chrome RDP app from Fusion Labs optimized for Google Cloud Platform is now available for free to our customers for use with Windows in Google Compute Engine,” Buhr adds. “This enables customers using the Chrome browser to create remote desktop sessions to their Windows instances in Google Compute Engine without the need for additional software by simply clicking on the RDP button in the Google Developer Console. In addition, because Google Developers Console stores and passes the login for the Windows credentials to the RDP app, customers are able to leave the complexity of managing unique user IDs and passwords for each Windows instance to Google.”

Better Windows support has apparently been a highly requested issue to be addressed, so these items should prove to be a major step in the right direction.

Image via Google