I went in search of Azure Stack at Microsoft’s Ignite event. I found a few in the Expo. It is now shipping and the Lenovo guy said they had sold a dozen or so already.
Why Azure Stack? Microsoft’s point is that it lets you run exactly the same application on premises or in its public cloud. The other thing is that although you have some maintenance burden – power, cooling, replacing bits if they break – it is pretty minimal; the configuration is done for you.
I talked to one of the vendors about the impact on VMware, which dominates the market for virtualisation in the datacentre. My sense in the VMware vs Hyper-V debate is that VMware still has an edge, particularly in its management tools but Hyper-V is solid (aside from a few issues with Cluster Shared Volumes) and a lot less expensive. Azure Stack is Hyper-V of course; and the point the vendor made was that configuring an equivalent private cloud with VMware would be possible but hugely more expensive, not only in license cost but also in the skill needed to set it all up correctly.
So I think this is a smart move from Microsoft.
Why no Dell? They told me it was damaged in transit. Shame.
Lenovo
Cisco
HP Enterprise
Forklift driver did some serious damage to our 12-node Azure Stack on Saturday. 🙁
Dell EMC has 30+ deployed to date, across EMEA and North America.
Keep in mind that while Hyper-V may provide the Hypervisor, this is a closed system/appliance.
Customers need to provide 2-3 Ports into their existing network.
Customer interaction with the system is almost exclusively done through the ARM Portal, the same as with Azure Public.
Azure Stack presents customers with a “Green Field” opportunity to move to a Cloud Native environment, keep the existing
VMware environment for virtualization until those Applications can be migrated to Cloud Native. VMware is far better suited to virtualization, and Azure Stack, while capable of IaaS, is better positioned to move organizations forward to Cloud Native…