Since launching Google Compute Engine in 2015, we have been focused on building a cloud on which you can run all your applications—including Microsoft applications. Today, we’re excited to announce new features and services to help your Windows workloads take advantage of GCP’s leading infrastructure, data analytics and open-source innovations.

These enhancements make it a great time to start moving your enterprise Windows workloads to Google Cloud and take advantage of its leading performance and technological innovation, while preserving investments in software licenses. Our infrastructure becomes your infrastructure, and our innovation becomes your innovation.

Bring your own licenses
For your Microsoft workloads, in addition to purchasing on-demand licenses from Google Cloud, you now have the flexibility to bring your existing licenses to GCP. Using sole-tenant nodes you can launch your existing Windows workloads onto physical Compute Engine servers dedicated exclusively to you. With sole tenants, you have visibility into the underlying characteristics of your machine to determine license usage for your reporting and compliance needs.

A seamless migration
We’re also making it easier for you to migrate Microsoft workloads into GCP. Velostrata, our streaming migration tool, will be updated in a couple of weeks to give you the ability to specifically tag Microsoft workloads that require sole tenancy, and to automatically apply existing licenses. This is in addition to all the other Velostrata migration capabilities, such as built-in testing, instance rightsizing recommendations, post-migration rollback when needed, and booting apps in the cloud in as little as a few minutes. Best of all, you can take advantage of Velostrata to migrate your VMs or servers at no cost.

Active Directory, made easier
But just because you’ve decided to migrate Microsoft workloads into GCP doesn’t mean you need to do everything all at once. If you use Microsoft Active Directory (AD) to manage users and access to traditional applications, you’ll soon be able to use Managed Service for Microsoft Active Directory (AD), a highly available, hardened Google Cloud service running Microsoft AD, that helps you to manage your cloud-based AD-dependent workloads, automate AD server maintenance and security configuration, and connect your on-premises AD domain to the managed service.

Sign up to be notified when Managed Service for Microsoft AD becomes available in beta, and learn more about other identity and access management enhancements that we announced this week.

Managing Microsoft SQL Server for you
We want to make running Microsoft applications on GCP as easy for you as possible. As such, we’ve expanded Cloud SQL, our fully managed relational database server, to support Microsoft SQL Server. Currently in alpha, you can now choose to run SQL Server yourself on Google Compute Engine, or let us manage it for you on Cloud SQL, where we’ll take care of backups, replication, patches and updates.

Your future on Google Cloud
IT organizations comes in all shapes and sizes, and there’s no end to the variety of the workloads you run. Whatever your environment looks like, we believe that it can benefit from the Google Cloud’s advanced infrastructure and innovation. Click here to learn more about running your Windows workloads on GCP.