Google announces support for SQL Server Enterprise and Windows Server Core on Compute Engine

Google is getting serious about its enterprise business day by day. In the past few months, they have made several improvements to their cloud platform to make it attractive to large enterprises. They added support for building an ASP.NET application with Visual Studio and PowerShell, and more recently they added support for deploying Windows Server onto Google Compute Engine. Today, Google announced the availability of pre-configured images for Microsoft SQL Server Enterprise and Windows Server Core on Compute Engine.

Google also announced support for SQL Server AlwaysOn Availability Groups and persistent disk snapshots integrated with Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS) on Windows Server. Finally, all their Windows Server images are now enabled with Windows Remote Management support, including their Windows Server Core 2016 and 2012 R2 images.

• You can now launch Compute Engine VMs with Microsoft SQL Server Enterprise Edition pre-installed, and pay by the minute for SQL Server Enterprise and Windows Server licenses. Customers can also choose to bring their own licenses for SQL Server Enterprise.
• Mission-critical SQL Server workloads require support for high-availability and disaster recovery. To achieve this, GCP supports Windows Server Failover Clustering (WSFC) and SQL Server AlwaysOn Availability Groups.
• Being able to take snapshots in coordination with Volume Shadow Copy Service ensures that you get application-consistent snapshots for persistent disks attached to an instance running Windows — without having to shut it down. This feature is useful when you want to take a consistent backup for VSS-enabled applications like SQL Server and Exchange Server — without affecting the workload running on the VMs.

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