Azure Local (formerly Azure Stack HCI)
Azure Local is Microsoft's hyperconverged infrastructure platform for operation in your own data centre or at edge locations, managed through Azure Arc as the control plane. Until the rename in November 2024 the service was called Azure Stack HCI; a cluster is now called an instance. A hyperconverged instance comprises 1 to 16 machines, runs only on validated hardware from the Azure Local catalogue, and is billed per physical processor core through the Azure subscription — regardless of how many virtual machines run on it.
Azure Local (formerly Azure Stack HCI) in practice
Technically Azure Local consists of Hyper-V, Failover Clustering, Storage Spaces Direct and software-defined networking, complemented by Azure Arc as the control plane. On top of it you can run Azure Local VMs, AKS enabled by Azure Arc and Azure Virtual Desktop locally while still managing them from the Azure portal, the CLI or ARM templates.
Hyperconverged instances comprise 1 to 16 machines — at most eight for rack-aware clusters — while disaggregated deployments using external SAN storage scale to as many as 64 machines. The most important operational parameter is the Azure connection: an instance must sync successfully with Azure at least once every 30 consecutive days. If it does not, the connection status changes to Out of policy and the instance enters a reduced functionality mode — running VMs continue normally, but no new VMs can be created until the next successful sync.
For environments with strict sovereignty requirements there is also disconnected operations with a local control plane. Because billing is tied to physical cores rather than VM count, the model rewards high virtualisation density; licensing of Windows Server guests is handled separately, for example via Azure Hybrid Benefit or the Windows Server subscription add-on. Since the former name is still widely searched: Azure Stack HCI and Azure Local denote the same product line. On request Alendris designs hyperconverged clusters to be Azure Local compatible, so an initially local-only S2D cluster can later be connected hybrid without a rebuild.