At last week's Microsoft Management Summit (MMS) in Las Vegas, Microsoft execs tried to pitch their vision for cloud computing to the 5,300-plus systems administrator attendees of the meeting. They promised that the shiny new features of Microsoft System Center 2012 will revolutionize our lives. In the keynote, the features all demoed perfectly.

But we weren't there for the keynotes—we were there for the education sessions. Sessions are about reality—how we take the System Center software and make it work in our environments, with a limited budget and resources. This isn't to say the MMS crowd doesn't get excited about Microsoft's management products—we do, and we know that's weird. (Talk at the closing party for MMS included discussion of who got their photo taken with Wally Mead—"He’s like the father of ConfigMgr!”) We just happen to be the same people who have spent more of our lives reading Microsoft knowledge base articles and banging our heads against obscure errors than we would like to talk about.

As Anderson stood on stage during his keynote and spelled out Microsoft's definition of a private cloud, everyone was listening, but this wasn't exactly news. Microsoft has been pumping up its place in the cloud for the last four years at MMS.

To Microsoft, "private cloud" is really just using Windows Server and System Center 2012 together to create a more automated, flexible set of services.

While the vision that Anderson pitched puts Microsoft at the center, it is based on the same National Institute of Standards and Technology guidelines for cloud computing—guidelines that don't explicitly include virtualization as a requirement. NIST's definition has been adopted by most of the IT industry, with the possible exception of VMware, the target of Microsoft's recent "Tad Talks" spoof ad campaign and a series of veiled jabs during the keynote. (It's probably not in VMware's best interests to embrace a definition that leaves room for the possibility of achieving cloud-level service and functionality without using virtualization.)

Microsoft isn't going to unseat VMware overnight. Based on informal hand-raising during sessions and conversations with attendees later in the week, most of us are using a combination of hypervisors—with VMware still very much at the forefront. But Microsoft has moved to take over the management of the cloud by adding integration support under the hood of System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2012 for hypervisors like VMware ESX, Citrix Xenserver 6, and Hyper-V.

Microsoft's private cloud strategy uses the "foot-in-the-door "approach. Once you implement one of the System Center products successfully, it starts making sense to implement more. The more Microsoft products you use in your data center, the more attractive Hyper-V becomes.

But just how much success will Microsoft have convincing users to adopt VMM? The lack of support for VMware ESXi 5 means VMware's top customers are still out of reach. If Microsoft can keep closing the feature gap—through its own innovations or add-ons from its partners—there may come a day when organizations decide that VMware or Citrix's price tags aren't worth it anymore.

Drawing a picture of cloud

We've all looked into the eyes of someone talking about "cloud" and wondered for a moment if we're thinking about the same thing. While there were many excellent talks on how to use System Center 2012 in conjunction with Windows Server to implement the Microsoft Private Cloud, perhaps the most useful was a talk entitled "Why We Fail: An Architect's Journey to the Private Cloud," given by Alex Jauch, an ex-Microsoft Enterprise Architect who now works for NetApp.

Since this was a vendor-sponsored talk, there was naturally the fear that we had been lured into a technology timeshare session. But the packed room quickly found itself nodding along to Jauch's presentation. "Everyone seems to want it," Jauch said about the cloud. "If you talk to senior management in IT organizations, it's very rare to find one that doesn't want cloud. I want some of that cloud stuff. What is that? I don't know, but I want it. OK, here's some crayons, there you go, draw a cloud."

Jauch threw up two statistics for emphasis: a Gartner figure that said 78 percent of enterprise IT shops will deploy a "cloud computing strategy" by 2014; and from CIO.com, the harsh truth that 62 percent of all IT projects fail. Whether you trust the validity of the sources, not a single one of the 200 of us in the audience raised our hand when Jauch asked if there was anyone not feeling pressure to implement cloud solutions in their organizations. It is a scary place to be: feeling pressure to adopt "cloud," not having a sense that the entire organization understands what "cloud" is, and knowing that it is an incredibly risky and complex endeavor with a high probability of failure.

Jauch then went on to explain that many of us would fail in our cloud implementations not because we didn't choose the right product or vendor, but because we would treat the move to private cloud as a technology problem. At its core, he said, "cloud" is about a customer-centric business model, not technology. According to Jauch, "if you proceed along a technology path what are your odds of success? Slim to none."

The message of Jauch's session stood in stark contrast to the magic promised in Anderson's keynote presentation. When he stood brandishing a thumb drive mid-keynote and told us all that with this thumb drive we would have the entire "Microsoft Private Cloud in your pocket," it made cloud sound so easy. "Literally what you can do," said Anderson, "is insert this, answer a handful of questions, go have dinner, come back—the entire Microsoft Private Cloud will be set up and running for you." (The Twitter stream for #mms2012 was quickly filled with comments like "Is that a private cloud in your pocket or are you just happy to see me?")

Reality checks

I skipped lunch to head back to my hotel across the street to see what the Microsoft Private Cloud had to offer. The reality of this pocket cloud test drive was a little different. After going through the Readme file and checking prerequisites, I ran the installation—and it threw an error: "The WinRM settings are not configured correctly."

The error from the thumb drive was, in a way, a perfect microcosm of the state of IT and cloud computing—we're promised simplicity, but we get "some assembly required." Cloud computing and the consumerization of IT are incredibly powerful concepts with enormous potential to make our lives easier, and to save money—but getting from potential to reality isn't always quite as simple as we would like to admit.

The error is also strangely illustrative of why I love coming to MMS. When I Googled the error during my lunch break at the conference, the first result that came up was a Microsoft MVP's personal WordPress blog with a long how-to post (screenshots included) describing how to troubleshoot and resolve the error. No one paid him to write the solution—he just wanted to share what he had learned.

This is the community that MMS brings together from all over the world: IT pros from private industry, Microsoft employees, systems administrators, engineers, developers, IT management, and IT newbies. Everyone comes to learn, share their experiences, network, and—since this was held in Vegas—partake in a fair amount of evening drinking and gambling.

A world of connected devices (and A/V fail)

The other overarching theme of the conference, behind the cloud, was how to support the ever-expanding number and variety of devices users want to be able to work and access corporate data from—the consumerization of IT.

Anderson's second-day keynote was devoted to the topic, and focused on the need to shift from a corporate-controlled model to a more user-centric approach. This is news to no one, but what is news is the degree to which Microsoft is committed to real integration with iOS and Android.

Even a few years ago, it would have been laughable to suggest that you would see an iPhone onstage at a Microsoft event. But there was Brad Anderson, the corporate VP of Microsoft, walking up to the stage to demo the upcoming features of Windows Intune, which will allow the deployment of applications to an iPhone—one Anderson referred to as "my iPhone." And the very fact that Microsoft currently has a beta of Windows Intune that can deploy applications to an iPhone is in itself a huge step forward.

Sadly, the magical feeling was over far too soon. The A/V equipment failed to switch to the phone's screen, leaving Anderson standing helplessly at the podium amid chuckles from the MMS attendees before he recovered and segued to show the same features on a Windows Tablet. They were able to successfully live-demo the iPhone functionality at the end of the talk via an over-the-shoulder camera, though it was almost impossible to see.

Technical difficulties aside, it is encouraging to see Microsoft trying to offer the ability to manage non-Windows devices—considering the current options. But as discussed in the sessions, the reality of what Microsoft offers today for managing non-Windows devices is a bit underwhelming. Configuration Manager 2012 offers some integration with iOS and Android, but only through ActiveSync.

What that means is that administrators can support a large number of devices and generate reports on them. But for now, capabilities like settings management and remote wipe are at best theoretical and device-dependent. More advanced features like software distribution, multiple settings policies, and feedback on whether the settings have actually been applied are still out of reach.

Michael Bullwinkle is a System Engineer at Loyola University of Maryland.

Listing image by Photograph by Microsoft