I'm curious about moving away from Broadcom and toward Azure Local, but I'm hesitant about fully committing to the cloud. We have some Nutanix Clusters, but I've noticed some gaps. Has anyone made a successful transition from vSphere to Azure Local? I'd love to hear your experiences and any challenges you faced.
5 Answers
Honestly, unless you have a specific need for Azure Local or the Azure Stack HCI, I’d recommend sticking with a standard Hyper-V cluster. Microsoft has a mixed record with features—they often introduce them but then take them away. You can still achieve a hyper-converged infrastructure with storage spaces direct and keep it simpler.
If you're considering Azure Local, be prepared to potentially rebuild your entire cluster and the associated Azure subscription, which can be quite costly. Make sure you're ready for that investment upfront.
My team has just started experimenting with a Cisco hyper-converged cluster alongside Azure Local. We're not in production yet, but we're looking to leverage it for Kubernetes in the coming months, aiming to replace our current Docker Swarm setup.
There’s definitely a lot of negativity surrounding Azure Local, but if you can handle the need to regularly nuke and rebuild your cluster, it can work for certain use cases.
That's true! Azure Local is just a Hyper-V Cluster with S2D and an Azure Resource Bridge VM. It's useful if you plan to deploy workloads using ARM Templates, but if you don’t need that complexity, why add it?