Purchase an Azure subscription and activate only the cores you need for your hyperconverged infrastructure deployment ($10 per physical core, per month). Windows Server Datacenter customers with Software Assurance can get Azure Stack HCI at no additional cost with Azure Hybrid Benefit.
“Azure Kubernetes Service and Azure Arc … [have] the potential to provide a strong reduction in the time required to roll out new software to multiple ships.”
Stefano Zunino, IT Architectures and Solutions Director, Carnival Corporation
“By moving to Azure Stack HCI, we’ve gone from three full racks of hardware down to less than half a rack. We had a big, power-hungry infrastructure before, but now we can run more efficiently and cost-effectively.”
Ewan Campbell, Technical and Delivery Lead Officer, Fife Council
“Our Azure Stack HCI deployment has delivered a savings of roughly £400,000 a year on power and cooling alone compared with the C7000 blades we were running.”
Scott Robertson, Principal Enterprise Architect for Foundation Technology, Co-op Group
“Tapping into Azure, we now have a very Rolls Royce kind of system for a similar cost to what we were paying for the average family car.”
Gavin Lacey, Group Chief Operating Officer, CHPK Property and Construction Consultants
“Our applications are more performant with Azure Stack HCI. We’ve reduced processing times by 50%, and we no longer receive tickets relating to poor performance of our VDI environments.”
Francisco Castillo, Head of Infrastructure, SSP Group
“We’ve verified energy savings and reduced our carbon footprint since deploying Azure Stack HCI, which is not only a cost saving for our company—it’s important sustainability legislation that we must follow.”
Roland Reiter, Chief Information Officer, Franz Morat Group
The minimum is now one node, which is ideal for a remote office or branch office. The maximum is 16 nodes per single cluster.
You'll get extended security updates at no cost when you migrate your Windows Server 2008/R2, SQL Server 2008/R2, Windows Server 2012/R2 and SQL Server 2012 workloads to Azure Stack HCI.
No, there are no virtualization rights included with the host subscription. Customers running Windows VMs on this hyperconverged infrastructure solution need to procure an appropriate license.