Microsoft's hybrid cloud aims to help reduce Broadcom's footprint

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Microsoft has used its US in-house trade fair Ignite to reposition its hybrid cloud offerings under a new product name and with expanded functions. Customers who want to use Microsoft's cloud services in their own data center or directly on site in production facilities for technical reasons or driven by compliance or regulatory requirements, the manufacturer wants to pick up on this with its hybrid infrastructure services dubbed "adaptive cloud".

Microsoft previously offered separate services for this purpose, which the manufacturer now wants to standardize under one roof and equip with an extended range of functions. At the same time, customers who are willing to switch following the takeover of VMware by Broadcom are to be picked up.

Azure Local instead of Azure Stack

The new service, dubbed "Azure Local", replaces the on-prem offshoots of the Azure Cloud previously known as Azure Stack and Azure Stack HCI, with control being provided directly from the Azure Cloud. The Azure Arc service, which has been available for several years, will play a central role in this –. It will act as a bridge between the Azure Local instances distributed in data centers, edge locations or other cloud environments and the actual Azure Cloud.

This should enable customers to operate sophisticated applications that go beyond pure virtual machines, such as large enterprise applications, applications containerized in Kubernetes and AI services in environments of their choice. To this end, the manufacturer is making a subset of Azure services available locally. The necessary server systems are controlled by OEM hardware partners such as Dell, HPE and Lenovo at – with flexible designs ranging from the smallest servers to large machines.

The "Azure Local" range of functions therefore naturally goes far beyond the operation of a simple Hyper-V and System Center Virtual Machine Manager environment, which was given a new lease of life with the recent release of Windows Server 2025. Of course, this is also due to the changed market conditions since the VMware takeover by Broadcom.

Microsoft now uses the term Azure Local to describe – – all services running locally or outside the Azure Cloud at the customer's premises that are under the management control of Azure and appear there as resources in the Azure Portal.

Simplified updates

These can also be bare-metal servers with Windows or Linux, which then appear as resources in the Azure portal via the installation of the Azure Arc Agent and are controlled completely from the Azure cloud via the Azure APIs with regard to various operationally relevant functions such as software provisioning, configuration changes, deployment of updates or monitoring. Administrators can therefore dispense with conventional local management tools such as Microsoft's System Center products.

Microsoft wants to greatly simplify the unpopular deployment of updates: Updates can be bundled into monthly packages via the Azure Update Manager, for example, where drivers and firmware updates can also be delivered – if the hardware manufacturers cooperate.

Flexible configuration for VMs

The vast majority of critical applications currently run in virtual machines. With Azure Local, customers should be able to use flexible configuration options – depending on the specification of resources such as CPU, memory, network and storage, VM images from the Azure-side marketplace can be used or their own customer-specific images.

In an Azure Local environment consisting of several server nodes, VMs can be made highly available with storage replication and automatic failover. Microsoft has also thought about tooling – All new VMs created on Azure Local are immediately prepared for management integration into the cloud with Azure Arc and have tools such as Microsoft Defender for Server or Azure Monitor pre-installed.

Migration help for VMware customers

Microsoft also took a swipe at Broadcom in its announcement: A preview version of Azure Migrate helps to convert existing VMware VMs and their virtual hard disks to Azure Local completely in their own data center, with the actual data remaining local. Only metadata has to migrate through the cloud.

According to Microsoft, this should enable customers to reduce their "Broadcom footprint" and dependency on their license model without having to extensively rebuild applications. Microsoft provides initial details on the migration tool, which is currently in beta, here.

Server recommendations

Microsoft also recommends suitable server hardware at – Dell's Apex Cloud Platform MC-4000r/z or Lenovo's ThinkAgile MX455 V3 Edge PR Server are listed as "Premier Solution", where firmware updates can also be delivered via Azure Local. Many of the qualified servers should also allow the integration of Nvidia GPUs such as A2, A16 or L40 to accelerate virtual desktops or AI applications.

Thanks to GPU Partitioning (GPU-P), administrators can divide the expensive GPU resources between VMs – together with hotpatching for Windows Server () are probably the most interesting technical features of Azure Local.

(mack)