Azure Local extends Azure to customer-owned infrastructure, enabling local execution of modern and traditional applications across distributed locations. This solution offers a unified management experience on a single control plane and supports a wide range of validated hardware from trusted Microsoft partners.

Azure Local also accelerates cloud and AI innovation by seamlessly delivering new applications, workloads, and services from cloud to edge.

Overview

An Azure Local instance consists of a machine or a cluster of machines running the Azure Stack HCI operating system and connected to Azure. You can use the Azure portal to monitor and manage individual Azure Local instances as well as view all the deployments of Azure Local. You can also manage Azure Local with your existing tools, including Windows Admin Center and PowerShell.

You can Download the operating system software from the Azure portal with a free 60-day trial.

To acquire the machines that support Azure Local, you can purchase validated hardware from a Microsoft hardware partner with the operating system pre-installed. See the Azure Local Catalog for hardware options and use the sizing tool to estimate hardware requirements.

Azure Local features and architecture

Azure Local is built on proven technologies including Hyper-V, Storage Spaces Direct, and core Azure Management service.

Each Azure Local instance consists of 1 to 16 physical machines. All machines share common configurations and resources by leveraging the Windows Server Failover Clustering feature.

Azure Local combines the following:

• Validated hardware from a hardware partner.
• Azure Stack HCI OS.
• Hyper-V-based compute resources.
• Storage Spaces Direct-based virtualized storage.
• Windows and Linux virtual machines as Arc-enabled servers.
• Azure Virtual Desktop.
• Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) enabled by Azure Arc.
• AI and machine learning workload deployment.
• Azure services including monitoring, backup, site recovery, and more.
• Azure portal, Azure Resource Manager and Bicep templates, Azure CLI and tools.

See What’s new in Azure Local for details on the latest enhancements.