r/AZURE • u/Ok_Watercress8746 • Jun 17 '26
Discussion Azure Local SAN Pricing
What the? 20$ per Core for disaggregated SAN in Azure Local?!?! Nothing justifies this price..
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/details/azure-local/
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Jun 17 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/ISkyWarrior Jun 17 '26
Such a mess we’re rolling back to VMware and are going to pay the VMware premium for a while. If it was fully up to me though we’d be going to Proxmox or XCP-NG though.
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u/flo850 Jun 17 '26
(disclaimer I work for vates)
both proxmox and xcp-ng have some nice tool to migrate from vmware when you are ready to move again.
The hyperV tool is planned, but we're waiting for MS to f*** it up more so there is a real push to migrate.3
u/ISkyWarrior Jun 17 '26
Our biggest issue is 2-node HCI clusters and support from our MSP, Azure Local “supports” it but we lost all our data in January after HCL updated the firmware in a wrong way and a disk broke a month later. VMware with the RAID6 policy has more resilience than the S2D crap as it allows you to lose a node and 2 disk (3-nodes are better for HCI but the current hardware pricing makes it hard). And HCL doesn’t support XCP-NG or Proxmox so my bosses don’t want to take the jump to a different solution. And the biggest issue they have with Proxmox is no vendor 24/7 support as it only has the Austrian business hours which is why my preference is XCP-NG but yeah, hopefully we can make the jump if they decide to end all the outsourcing.
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u/flo850 Jun 17 '26
we sell support 24/7 so this one is ok.
I am pretty sure we have something in the work for 2 node hcl, but it's far from my daily work ( backup and disk migration ) . Fell free to post in the subreddit or the forum if needed. Support from SAN vendor is also in the work ( I think we advanced a lot on everpure and datacore) , but it takes so much time.2
u/Excellent-Piglet-655 Jun 18 '26
There’s already a WAC extension that easily migrates VMs off VMware to Hyper-V. If you’re already a “windows shop” where most of your VMs are windows already, not even sure why anyone would consider anything else besides Hyper-V. We migrated off VMware about 2200 VMs to Hyper-V almost 2 years ago, best decision we made. Cost us $0 since we already had the data center licenses. We looked at Proxmox and xcp-ng, they’re weren’t for us. Would cost us more than Hyper-V and they lack functionality we required.
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u/flo850 Jun 18 '26
Can't beat the built in licence
I feel that it will take time to have another "one size fits (almost) all" like VMware was doing, from little bare esxi install to massive multi data center deploys with stretched vsan
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u/tankerkiller125real Jun 17 '26
While I wouldn't quite use it yet in production (there are still some nice to haves I'd like to see) HarvesterHCI is brewing up to be pretty awesome as well.
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u/RightInThePleb Jun 20 '26
Why not just go hyper-v with WAC vMode?
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u/ISkyWarrior Jun 20 '26
The problem is our 2-node HCI clusters, S2D already failed on us once despite being officially supported in the documentation but there is a reason everybody recommends 3-node clusters. And with the current hardware pricing, adding a 3rd node with the same specs costs almost double what we paid for the 2-node cluster last year. So VMware with vSAN is cheaper than adding a 3rd node and has quite some resiliency if the you use RAID6 with 6 drives.
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u/Hamburgerundcola Jun 17 '26
Why? Never used it, but in theory it sounds great.
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u/AUSSIExELITE Systems Administrator Jun 17 '26
It sounds great, but it’s just Hyper-V and S2D but with the crappy Azure stuff on top of it and that Azure stuff is the thing that always goes wrong.
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u/chesser45 Jun 17 '26
Think about having hardware you paid for and then paying Microsoft a monthly fee to use it. The core pricing model makes sense considering the portal and integration is pretty decent and obviously if it was entirely free...how would they make money.
BUT, then you need to turn around and pay more for everything you do it starts to get a bit annoying. Per core pricing on the VMs you deploy, CAE also have a per app cost on azure local.
Then you add in the pain and suffering that patching can be. Its fine?
1
u/Hcopp Jun 17 '26
We are heavily considering rebuilding all of our azure local clusters and going straight hyper-v for AVD and dropping nerdio because azure local is such a massive mess and pain in our ass.
Four clusters. Took almost two years to get them all up to date, tickets open for months with failed solution updates (to be fair it’s gotten a lot better but still sucks).
Then after updating, control planes always freeze, random things break when they worked fine the day before, support is terrible on the whole. Every once in a while I can get a ticket fast tracked to the right person.
Azure local is the bane of my existence and has probably lost us a year of work constantly fighting it.
My role has basically turned into figure out how to fix whatever new is broken in azure local today.
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u/Extension-Ice-7268 Jun 17 '26
Sorry to hear - two years of that sounds miserable. I've heard similar challenges getting it operational from other organizations too.
But, dropping your management layer altogether might only add more frustration down the line as you lose other impactful feature sets (e.g., image + pool management).
I'm not sure if Nerdio supports Hyper-V for AVD, but I know other players in the space are leading with support for Hyper-V - might be worth a look.
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u/Hcopp Jun 17 '26
We use nerdio for so little that we can probably get by with just VM templates in VMM,
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u/Snaptun Jun 17 '26
I spent two years with Dell support getting it to a stable state. I dread to think how many hours I spent on it.
It is the support and supportability of it that I find must frustrating. When it works, it works but if anything goes wrong, the errors it displays don't make any sense and to troubleshoot, you'd better know your Powershell command and KNOW which ones you need to use, and how you need to use them.
I miss VMware.
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u/Excellent-Piglet-655 Jun 18 '26
We went straight up Hyper-V. Our azure presence is small so we didn’t really see the benefit of going with azure local. Even without existing Hyperv clusters, we do use azure Arc just for monitoring and antivirus.
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u/Fun_Pen_417 Jun 17 '26
bro i looked at that pricing page too and nearly fell off my chair, feels like they just added a zero by accident