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 Stack HCI is good, but there is still a need to use an encryption tool for the transfer of data between the source and destination.
IT Solution Architect at a educational organization with 11-50 employees
Real User
Top 5
Jul 3, 2025
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.
A little bit of the storage architecture could be improved. The integrated switching could use some enhancements. The virtualization platform always has room for improvement. Hyper V seems to lag behind compared to VMware.
Engineering Technologist at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
Real User
Top 20
Aug 21, 2024
Speaking about the tool's challenges, I would say that if you know the product, you probably know why there are challenges in it. The challenge now is that Microsoft has too many things to do with the management of Microsoft Azure Portal. There are just too many things you can do from Microsoft Azure Portal. So you have to do a lot of things in a traditional way with PowerShell, which works fine for a lot of customers, but for a lot of customers, it is not enough. The biggest challenge with the tool is not being able to manage everything from Microsoft Azure Portal. In the future, I want to see the tool offer better integration and multi-cluster management in Microsoft Azure Portal. With multi-cluster management, you can view all of your virtual machines across all of the clusters you have and maybe move the machines between the clusters, which is something that I would love to see.
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 complex. So, from an operational perspective, it's very difficult to manage. So whoever is actually managing it should find it easier. Therefore, I would like to improve the operational aspect by making it easier for users. The deployment process can also be improved. It's purely based on PowerShell settings. So, there's a bit of optimization and tuning that can be done in the process settings as well because the current deployment process takes approximately one hour. But again, it's a one-time process. We can always counter the challenge by saying that we don't want to improve it because it's a one-time process. But one hour is a bit long. So there's some tuning happening, especially a service fabric cluster thing, which has been taken care of now in the next version of HCI. The service fabric service is completely removed, and they are integrating the control plane process of software-defined networking into the HCI node itself, not running it inside a VM. So that's a good thing. Azure Stack HCI is already being used by many customers in the market. The only complexity and challenge is with Software Defined Networking (SDN) alerts. So, I haven't seen many customers using it yet because I'm the only person here who's good at Software Defined Networking and HCI right now. That's a challenge because a lot of people depend on me since I'm the only one working on this. So I want to improve that area as well. I need more people to be accustomed to this product so we can help our customers more efficiently in different time zones. At the same time, support is challenging for Azure Stack HCI with Software Defined Networking (SDN). We are trying to create a new team and train them to make sure we have more people available in this region to work on this product and help customers in a better way.
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,...
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 Stack HCI is good, but there is still a need to use an encryption tool for the transfer of data between the source and destination.
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.
A little bit of the storage architecture could be improved. The integrated switching could use some enhancements. The virtualization platform always has room for improvement. Hyper V seems to lag behind compared to VMware.
Speaking about the tool's challenges, I would say that if you know the product, you probably know why there are challenges in it. The challenge now is that Microsoft has too many things to do with the management of Microsoft Azure Portal. There are just too many things you can do from Microsoft Azure Portal. So you have to do a lot of things in a traditional way with PowerShell, which works fine for a lot of customers, but for a lot of customers, it is not enough. The biggest challenge with the tool is not being able to manage everything from Microsoft Azure Portal. In the future, I want to see the tool offer better integration and multi-cluster management in Microsoft Azure Portal. With multi-cluster management, you can view all of your virtual machines across all of the clusters you have and maybe move the machines between the clusters, which is something that I would love to see.
We faced multiple problems with the product’s stability. The product must provide more versions and bug fixes.
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 complex. So, from an operational perspective, it's very difficult to manage. So whoever is actually managing it should find it easier. Therefore, I would like to improve the operational aspect by making it easier for users. The deployment process can also be improved. It's purely based on PowerShell settings. So, there's a bit of optimization and tuning that can be done in the process settings as well because the current deployment process takes approximately one hour. But again, it's a one-time process. We can always counter the challenge by saying that we don't want to improve it because it's a one-time process. But one hour is a bit long. So there's some tuning happening, especially a service fabric cluster thing, which has been taken care of now in the next version of HCI. The service fabric service is completely removed, and they are integrating the control plane process of software-defined networking into the HCI node itself, not running it inside a VM. So that's a good thing. Azure Stack HCI is already being used by many customers in the market. The only complexity and challenge is with Software Defined Networking (SDN) alerts. So, I haven't seen many customers using it yet because I'm the only person here who's good at Software Defined Networking and HCI right now. That's a challenge because a lot of people depend on me since I'm the only one working on this. So I want to improve that area as well. I need more people to be accustomed to this product so we can help our customers more efficiently in different time zones. At the same time, support is challenging for Azure Stack HCI with Software Defined Networking (SDN). We are trying to create a new team and train them to make sure we have more people available in this region to work on this product and help customers in a better way.