Not really. It’s Hyper-V and S2D with some Azure “magic” sprinkled on top to allow you to create and manage VM’s from the Azure portal. There are some differences in how you manage the hosts (Windows Defender Application Control is enabled as well as BitLocker, and updates must be done through the portal). There are also some Azure Local specific PowerShell modules and commands for managing the cluster. The biggest difference though is probably their Network ATC component, which is actually pretty cool.

We are a big Microsoft/Azure shop, so we went with Azure Local. Proxmox was the other option we were looking at, but we determined it wasn’t a good fit at this time. That may change in 5 years when we go to upgrade hardware again, and we already have plans to continue to evaluate it.

Our VMware costs have doubled for our last 3 renewals. We had a project this year to move to another hypervisor. Most of our hardware was old, and we were able to replace all of our hardware AND buy the license for the new hypervisor and it’s still cheaper than renewing one year of VMware.