Azure Local vs Dell XC Appliance comparison

Microsoft and Dell Technologies are both solutions in the HCI category. Microsoft is ranked #13 with an average rating of 7.6, while Dell Technologies is ranked #17 with an average rating of 9.0. Microsoft holds a 3.2% mindshare in HCI, compared to Dell Technologies’s 1.1% mindshare. Additionally, 100% of Microsoft users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 100% of Dell Technologies users who would recommend it.

Azure Local

Read 8 Azure Local reviews

1,633 Views
1,633 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

Dell XC Appliance

Read 8 Dell XC Appliance reviews

555 Views
549 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

Azure Local

Dell XC Appliance

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Jan 21, 2026

Dell XC Appliance and Azure Local compete in hyper-converged infrastructure solutions. Dell XC Appliance has an advantage in integration and long-term value, while Azure Local excels with its broad cloud services and scalability.

Features: Dell XC Appliance provides integrated server, storage, and virtualization capabilities, emphasizing simplicity and efficiency for IT infrastructure. Azure Local offers robust cloud integration, flexibility for hybrid scenarios, and expansive cloud resources, allowing it to support a wide range of environments.

Room for Improvement: Dell XC Appliance could enhance its cloud service offerings and flexibility to better match evolving IT needs. It may also improve its adaptability to hybrid environments. Azure Local can refine its deployment process, simplify operational management, and improve its user interface to reduce the learning curve.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Dell XC Appliance offers a straightforward deployment process and strong enterprise support, which is advantageous for rapid setups. Azure Local requires a more intricate cloud configuration process but provides comprehensive global support services, catering to diverse user needs.

Pricing and ROI: Dell XC Appliance generally involves a higher initial investment, justified by long-term integration benefits and low additional costs. Azure Local provides flexible, usage-based pricing, promoting cost savings through its pay-as-you-go model, making it potentially more affordable based on actual usage.

To learn more, read our detailed Azure Local vs. Dell XC Appliance Report (Updated: December 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Azure Local vs. Dell XC Appliance

December 2025

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Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:

Categories and Ranking

Azure Local

Ranking in HCI

13th

Average Rating

7.6

Reviews Sentiment

5.8

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Dell XC Appliance

Ranking in HCI

17th

Average Rating

8.6

Reviews Sentiment

8.5

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Mindshare comparison

As of January 2026, in the HCI category, the mindshare of Azure Local is 3.2%, up from 1.9% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Dell XC Appliance is 1.1%, up from 0.2% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

HCI Market Share Distribution
Product	Market Share (%)
Azure Stack HCI	3.2%
Dell XC Appliance	1.1%
Other	95.7%

HCI

Featured Reviews

Martin Coloumbe

IT Solution Architect at a educational organization with 11-50 employees

Experience with seamless cost-saving capacity, though integration and support need refinement

An area that could be possibly improved with Azure Stack HCI is the stretched cluster functionality, which was included in version 23H2 for disaster recovery purposes. However, this functionality has been put on hold for the next release, and Microsoft has decided to discontinue stretched cluster technology completely, which is disappointing. They promise to bring back a significant or similar solution in a future release, but currently, there is no such functionality for stretched clusters between two sites in the latest versions of Azure Stack HCI, which poses a problem as we were looking forward to utilizing it. The integration with Azure Arc provides a unified management experience, but I find it to be fairly clunky. The integration exists, but it is not smooth or very easy to use. While they've started to integrate the two, the integration lacks maturity and makes it difficult to manage effectively. There are discrepancies between managing VMs through Azure Arc versus managing them directly, as changes made not using the Azure Arc integration are not easily reflected in Azure Arc. For instance, if I have an Arc-enabled VM and make changes to it outside the Arc interface, those changes may not be registered directly in Azure Arc, leading to issues in fully viewing the status and configuration of VMs depending on the management tool used. You either manage VMs fully through Arc or not at all because mixing the two methods results in incomplete visibility and inconsistencies.

Read full review

reviewer2644977

Works

Enables seamless integration with multiple software and outstanding AI tools

The main issue with the DirectVXL appliance is that it only supports a single orchestrator or hypervisor. If multi-hypervisor support is required and VMware does not provide it, then Dell's appliance won't support it. I find it overly reliant on VMware. In cases of company mergers involving different platforms, software that can handle a multi-hypervisor environment would facilitate quicker integration.

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Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:

Pros

"The integration with Azure using Azure Arc is excellent."

"Some of the best features of Azure Stack HCI are that, as we are primarily a Microsoft Windows Server organization using Microsoft Windows Server on most of our servers, we already own data center licenses for Microsoft operating systems, and the hypervisor, Azure Stack HCI, actually comes with that license, which allows us to switch from VMware to Azure Stack HCI without any additional cost, significantly reducing our operational costs, especially now that Broadcom has purchased VMware, to $0."

"The features of Azure Stack HCI that have proven to be the most beneficial for optimizing our company's data center operations revolve around its performance."

"The scalability is extremely good."

"Azure Stack HCI has been very beneficial for disaster recovery operations, though the main data center still has a mix of infrastructure between other products."

"Azure Local, formerly known as Azure Stack HCI, is gaining attention due to its offering of a cloud experience on-premises."

"The solution has the latest processor."

"The most valuable feature of the solution is its ability to manage VMs."

More Azure Local pros

"What I like the most is that it is easy to implement, easy deployment and that it's easy to manage."

"The most valuable feature is the low management overhead, and the lower skill set required to manage it."

"The most valuable features are the deduplication and the compression features."

"The most valuable feature is that you can assign a volume to an off-shore workload on the fly."

"It's an extremely stable solution, and I highly recommend it."

"When we compare it to normal hardware servers, I'd say it is quite easy to configure and deploy."

"From a single screen, I can view VM details, performance, and hardware issues, such as power supply or fan malfunctions, along with RAM module problems."

"The solution's best feature is its simplicity. It's so simple to deploy it. You've got the VMware, and it's own appliance. It is really helpful. The system is online within half a day and saves so much time."

More Dell XC Appliance pros

Cons

"A little bit of the storage architecture could be improved."

"The implementation was very difficult for the operation team at that time, as the necessary skills to implement and integrate this product were not available."

"The product's initial setup phase can be a bit complex, making it an area where improvements are required."

"There are a lot of areas for improvement. Since I've been working very closely with this product, there are many areas, especially in software-defined networking. We had to improve multiple areas because we depended on the service fabric cluster to manage the software-defined network. That means we're already running a hypervisor inside a VM, and we're managing the control plane of the software-defined network. That's another cluster. So, multiple layers make the complexity more. So, from an operational perspective, it's very difficult to manage."

"Hyper V seems to lag behind compared to VMware."

"The biggest challenge with the tool is not being able to manage everything from Microsoft Azure Portal."

"We faced multiple problems with the product’s stability."

"Currently, there is no support for the servers that are not in the cluster."

"There should be more provisioning capabilities within the solution."

"The solution's storage size could be improved."

"The main issue with the DirectVXL appliance is that it only supports a single orchestrator or hypervisor. If multi-hypervisor support is required and VMware does not provide it, then Dell's appliance won't support it."

"In the next release, I would like to see support for Docker and containers."

"Dell needs to do a lot of work to simplify the maintenance and life-cycle upgrades for the product."

"The cost of using the public cloud deployment is astronomical."

"We are not always advised of new features or updates, so we must research to stay up to date."

More Dell XC Appliance cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The main licenses are the OS licenses, the OEM licenses, and so on. They are very much aligned with the cost of expectations. We never had any challenges with the licensing at all."

"The pricing is high compared to other tools."

"The price point is very fair for a product in this category but can vary depending on the components selected within the family of products."

"The pricing is good."

"The pricing for Dell EMC solutions is quite expensive and not really made for small or medium-sized businesses."

"We received a good price from Dell."

"The pricing is dependent on the technology and is in direct relation to the manufacturer and the components."

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

15%

Manufacturing Company

Financial Services Firm

Government

Manufacturing Company

15%

Comms Service Provider

Computer Software Company

Energy/Utilities Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	4
Midsize Enterprise	1
Large Enterprise	3

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	5
Midsize Enterprise	1
Large Enterprise	2

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Azure Stack HCI?

The solution has the latest processor.

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Azure Stack HCI?

This solution costs €10 per core per month. The whole stack is free if you are renting Windows Server Datacenter.

See all answers

What needs improvement with Azure Stack HCI?

There could be improvements with Azure Stack HCI regarding the license and price, as they have significantly higher prices compared to other competitors. The end-to-end encryption provided by Azure...

See all answers

What advice do you have for others considering Dell XC Appliance?

My advice for people who are selling this product is to first make sure that you educate the customers. The customer doesn't often know much about HCI and what the need to be using it for. If they ...

See all answers

What needs improvement with Dell XC Appliance?

See all answers

What is your primary use case for Dell XC Appliance?

Dell offers several benefits with its appliances. Primarily, I can combine them horizontally and vertically, reaching up to sixty-four nodes. Additionally, Dell employs its own artificial intellige...

See all answers

Comparisons

Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) vs Azure Local

Compared 23% of the time

VMware vSAN vs Azure Local

Compared 22% of the time

VxRail vs Azure Local

Compared 8% of the time

Lenovo ThinkAgile HX Series vs Azure Local

Compared 6% of the time

Dell PowerFlex vs Azure Local

Compared 5% of the time

More Azure Local Competitors

Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) vs Dell XC Appliance

Compared 27% of the time

VxRail vs Dell XC Appliance

Compared 18% of the time

Dell vSAN Ready Nodes vs Dell XC Appliance

Compared 9% of the time

Lenovo ThinkAgile HX Series vs Dell XC Appliance

Compared 9% of the time

More Dell XC Appliance Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Azure Local

January 2026

Download Azure Local product report

Buyer's Guide

HCI

December 2025

Download Dell XC Appliance product report

Overview

Azure Local integrates on-premises infrastructure with cloud services, offering tools for software-defined networking, Kubernetes deployment, and VM management. It ensures cost efficiency through existing Microsoft licenses and robust disaster recovery, despite some complexities in deployment.

Azure Local is designed for businesses needing a blend of local and cloud services while remaining compliant with data privacy regulations. It excels in environments demanding high computing power, software-defined networking, and seamless scaling through Azure Kubernetes Service and Azure DevOps. Although it offers excellent VM management and analytics capabilities with Microsoft Fabric, deployment complexity and operational challenges remain. Businesses looking for a robust edge computing solution find significant benefits, especially with efficient local Azure storage and advanced hardware such as the latest processors and SSDs. There are areas needing improvements like multi-cluster management, stability, and Initial setup, which can be cumbersome. Pricing can be a concern against competitors, and enhanced support and training are needed for smoother user experience.

What are the key features of Azure Local?

Software-Defined Networking: Facilitates management with drag-and-drop setup.
Kubernetes Deployment: Provides Azure Kubernetes Service for managing microservices.
VM Management: Reduces server count and enhances efficiency.
Integration with Azure Arc: Seamless collaboration with Azure Arc for hybrid deployments.
Infrastructure as Code: Utilizes Azure DevOps for deployment.
Analytics Capabilities: Microsoft Fabric enhances insights and decision-making.

What benefits should businesses expect from Azure Local?

Cost Efficiency: Leverages existing Microsoft licenses for financial savings.
Improved Disaster Recovery: Advanced edge computing features bolster resiliency.
High Performance: Enhanced by the latest processors and SSDs for demanding applications.
Seamless Cloud Integration: Smooth transition capabilities between local and cloud environments.

Azure Local finds application in sectors like manufacturing and maritime operations where robust edge computing helps in seamless data management and analytics. Factories benefit from compliance with data privacy rules while blended local and cloud services improve efficiency on ships, providing an alternative to VMware with support for virtual desktops and SQL Managed Instances.

Microsoft

XC Series hyper-converged appliances integrate Dell EMC 14th generation PowerEdge servers with Nutanix software to offer one of the industry’s most versatile and scalable hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) platforms. By supporting a choice of hypervisors, XC Series appliances can be deployed quickly for all virtualized workloads to reduce management complexity and total cost of ownership.

Dell Technologies

Sample Customers

Information Not Available

Cardlytics, AEW Energie, Aubert, Zhongtong Information Service, Commune de Villepinte, Teikyo University Hospital

Buyer's Guide

Azure Local vs. Dell XC Appliance

December 2025

Free Report: Azure Local vs. Dell XC Appliance

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