At the last Microsoft PDC conference, the company’s Chief Software Architect Ray Ozziesaid that customers will be able to upload their (Hyper-V) virtual machines inside the soon-to-be-launched cloud computing platform Windows Azure.

More clearly, Ozzie said that Microsoft will support the hosting mode offered by Xen-based (like Amazon EC2) and VMware-based cloud architectures, but, besides that, the company didn’t provide any detail about the availability of this IaaS component or the way it works.

The only thing we know for sure is that Microsoft is preparing a toolkit to guide its customers to extend their virtual data center into the Azure cloud.
Now we also know that this toolkit is going to be available in March 2010.

The Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) component of Azure will be launched January 1, 2010. Maybe Microsoft plans to announce an Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) part too, and that one will arrive in March.