Azure Local
Heaton, Joseph@Wildlife
Anyone have any experience with this? Looks like I’d need to convert from VMWare to Hyper-V and whatever this S2D storage is? Looks like it would be a significant savings in regard to licensing, since we already have Datacenter licenses applied to all our datacenter VM hosts, with SA, etc.
Just wondering about any real world experiences.
Thanks,
Joe Heaton
Solutions Engineer
Information Technology Operations Branch
Data and Technology Division
CA Department of Fish and Wildlife
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Sacramento, CA 95811
Phone: 916-902-9116
Book time with Heaton, Joseph@Wildlife
Wright, John M
No real-world experience but looking into it, I see one thing flagged. Common reports are that S2D storage can be unreliable. Some of the issues are attributed to not using certified hardware. But also certain configurations can cause problems. I’d look carefully into how reliability would be affected by your current setup (sans VMWare of course).
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John Wright
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Please submit IT requests to Hazelwoo...@bluegrass.org
24 Hour Helpline 1.800.928.8000
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Philip Elder
Azure Local = Azure integrated Storage Spaces Direct (S2D)
S2D = Windows Server Hyper-V and Storage Spaces configured in a Hyper-Converged Infrastructure configuration.
We’ve been deploying S2D since its inception in Windows Server 2016 RTM/GA.
We’ve been deploying Storage Spaces since its inception in Windows Server 2012 RTM/GA.
We’ve been deploying Hyper-V since its inception in Windows Server 2008 RTM/GA.
It does not matter the product whether VMware or Hyper-V/S2D it matters that the solution is designed for the intended product and implemented in the correct manner.
There are plenty of first hand stories heard here about vSAN blow-outs and S2D blow-outs and VMware vMotion cluster blowouts and Hyper-V cluster blowouts and so on with the primary cause being a FusterCluck of the above.
I _highly_ suggest S2D over Azure Local.
NOTE: S2D is a particular beast and requires a particular kind of architecture. It can be SAN integrated as of Windows Server 2025 so one can have two levels of storage:
- Local: 1M IOPS sub 1ms latency no sweat
- SAN: IOPS yeah latency sure that 15ms on a SQL instance is going to bring ecstasy to the C-Suite! 😉
As a point of order, we have staked our business and our client’s businesses on the above for ten years with nary an issue.
When done right it just works.
Philip Elder MCTS
Senior Technical Architect
Microsoft High Availability MVP
MPECS Inc.
E-mail: Phili...@MPECSInc.Ca
Teams: Phili...@MPECSInc.Cloud
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From: 'Heaton, Joseph@Wildlife' via ntsysadmin <ntsys...@googlegroups.com>
Sent: Tuesday, September 29, 2026 13:09
To: ntsys...@googlegroups.com
Subject: [ntsysadmin] Azure Local
Anyone have any experience with this? Looks like I’d need to convert from VMWare to Hyper-V and whatever this S2D storage is? Looks like it would be a significant savings in regard to licensing, since we already have Datacenter licenses applied to all our datacenter VM hosts, with SA, etc.
--
Heaton, Joseph@Wildlife
Philip,
Thank you for that answer. I just got off the phone with our Microsoft rep, as well as a couple of Microsoft Azure “experts”. They mentioned that they only recommend Azure Local for companies that have some regulatory requirements to stay on-prem. Their bigger recommendation was to migrate all of my on-prem VMs up to Azure as regular old Azure VMs. What’s your thought on that?
Background: we’ve been VMWare for more than the 17 years I’ve been here. We got into Azure about 6 or 7 years ago. We have one Enterprise app in Azure: ArcGIS Enterprise, with numerous servers. We have a handful of other VMs up there, 3 DCs, and a few others. My experience is patching them is a major PITA, using my on-prem ConfigMgr. Reboots take absolutely forever, and trying to use a maintenance window is extremely hit and miss with Azure VMs. And, of course, the ongoing costs is a concern for myself, at least. I need to get off VMWare as soon as possible, and I’m trying to get the replacement project going no later than first quarter of 27. Which means we need to make a decision on the replacement product quickly, in order to be able to procure it.
From: ntsys...@googlegroups.com <ntsys...@googlegroups.com> On Behalf Of Philip Elder
Sent: Tuesday, September 29, 2026 1:51 PM
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Subject: [ntsysadmin] RE: Azure Local
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