Today, Microsoft announced the beta release of new technologies that allow hosting service providers to deliver turnkey cloud services to customers, including high-scale websites and virtual machine hosting with an extensible self-service portal experience. 

These technologies run on Windows Server 2012 and System Center 2012, and are consistent with services found in Windows Azure. This announcement is further proof of Microsoft’s Cloud OS vision to deliver a consistent and comprehensive experience across all cloud datacenters – public, private or hosted.

First released as a community technology preview at the Worldwide Partner Conference in July 2012, today’s beta release is feature complete with key enhancements in the service management portal and API, high-density web sites and virtual machines hosting capabilities. The beta is in final testing phases and will be released to manufacturing in early 2013, along with System Center 2012 Service Pack 1 (SP1).

For more information on today’s announcement, please visit the Server and Cloud blog or this site.