Back during its inspire conference this year, Microsoft announced a preview of the next generation of Azure Stack HCI (hyperconverged infrastructure), a service that lets businesses leverage Azure services with their hybrid infrastructure and on-premise options through Azure Arc. This helps customers view and manage virtual desktops (VDIs) and databases through the Azure portal, run virtualized workloads on-premises, and more.
Today, the company announced that Azure Stack HCI is now generally available, adding that it tweaked the service with feedback from its customers during the preview period. This helped deliver a “full-featured offering” that simplifies management, offers stretch clustering to easily extend clusters to multiple sites and ease disaster recovery, and integrates natively with Azure Arc and other services.
Advantages of Stack HCI include the ability for customers to run the offering on their existing hardware – in addition to the various environments – that are validated by Microsoft, further reducing the costs of deploying the solution and integrating with Azure services. The Redmond firm says that the service is “familiar” for “Hyper-V and server admins” and also integrates with other services from the company such as System Center, Active Directory, and more.
Additionally, the company also touts its partnerships with vendors such as Dell, Lenovo, and DataON that helps provide an “integrated system experience” through systems that are pre-racked and come with software, hardware, and drivers pre-installed. These systems also add a new Azure Stack HCI full-stack updates feature that helps admins easily apply validated full-stack updates to the clusters. Lastly, the firm says that it is also bringing Independent Software Vendor support for Azure Stack HCI with the addition of ISVs such as CommVault, DataDog, Veeam, and Veritas, providing users with more options.
Those interested to try out the service can head here to register for a free 30-day trial. Earlier this year, the company touted the savings advantages of the service’s “flexible per core subscription model “. You can head to the pricing information page here for more details.