CIO — Microsoft (MSFT) has launched a series of partnerships, functional enhancements and product packages in an effort to make its cloud offerings more attractive to enterprise customers and raise the profile of its Hyper-V hypervisor as a potential ingredient for cloud-based systems.

It has also enhanced its Azure cloud service by giving customers the ability to launch and control Hyper-V based virtual machines and SQL Server instances, neither of which were available in earlier editions.

That additional support gives IT better control and makes it more possible to migrate applications from an internal data center to a cloud environment, though not to the point that it's easy to just lift internal applications to Azure and press 'run,' according to Chris Wolf, a research VP at Gartner.

The core part of Microsoft's new offering isn't a product, but a set of deployment guides, partnerships with hardware manufacturers who can supply preconfigured servers ready for Hyper-V based clouds, and service providers able to provide everything from hosting to development help.

Microsoft is accrediting hosting providers, offering training and reference architectures for Hyper-V based clouds to both internal IT and external integration providers, and offering direct consulting from both its own Consulting Services or outside partners. It also built an online catalog listing partners and services by function in a listing called the Cloud Hypermarket.

The hardware and reference architectures for software stacks that work well in Microsoft-based cloud environments come from Dell (DELL), Fujitsu, Hitachi, Hewlett-Packard (HPQ), IBM (IBM) and NEC, and include both private and public cloud deployments.

Microsoft offers its Azure platform-as-a-service offering as one of the service-provider options, but not the only one, allowing customers to choose whether they need platform-, infrastructure- software-as-a-service or other hosting services for their particular cloud.

Getting Beyond Azure Lock-In Worries?

Much of Microsoft's effort is an attempt to bring attention to its cloud offerings and the potential to use Hyper-V as the basis for either external or internal clouds, Wolf says.

"They're getting a little beyond the point that had people worried about lock-in to Azure and focusing more on a wider type of deployment," Wolf says. Rival VMware (VMW), which owns the bulk of the virtual server market and has made cloud computing the basis of its strategy for almost two years, is far better established, has a wider variety of technical options and a far wider installed base in companies with cloud projects, according to Jonathan Reeve, vice president of product strategy at Hyper9, which develops capacity planning software for cloud and virtual environments.

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