Compute Engine lets you create and run virtual machines on Google infrastructure. Compute Engine offers scale, performance, and value that allows you to easily launch large compute clusters on Google's infrastructure.

You can run your Windows applications on Compute Engine and take advantage of many benefits available to virtual machine instances, such as reliable storage options, the speed of the Google network, and Autoscaling.

In this hands-on lab, you learn how to launch a Windows Server instance in Compute Engine and use Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) to connect to it.

Create a virtual machine instance

In the Cloud Console, on the Navigation menu , click Compute Engine > VM instances, and then click Create.

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In the Machine configuration section, for Series select N1.
In the Boot disk section, click Change to begin configuring your boot disk.

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Choose Windows Server 2012 R2 Datacenter, and then click Select. Leave all other settings as their defaults.

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Click Create to create the instance.

Remote Desktop (RDP) into the Windows Server

Test the status of Windows Startup

After a short time, the Windows Server instance will be provisioned and listed on the VM Instances page with a green status icon.

However the server instance may not yet be ready to accept RDP connections, as it takes a while for all the OS components to initialize.

To see whether the server instance is ready for an RDP connection, run the following command at your Cloud Shell terminal command line:

gcloud compute instances get-serial-port-output instance-1