A journey to the cloud
Long-form posts on Azure Local, Bicep, PowerShell and the HomeLab series — written from a working environment.
When Microsoft renamed Azure Stack HCI to Azure Local, the rebrand felt cosmetic. It was not. Azure Local has become the foundation of Microsoft’s Sovereign Cloud, with connected, hybrid, and fully disconnected modes covering everything from edge sites to a...
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As of today I (Alex ter Neuzen) am a Microsoft MVP in the category Microsoft Azure. I have been writing these blogs lately and Microsoft gave me the…
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Azure Local 2605 is out (12.2605.1003.210, OS 26100.32860, released 28 May 2026). It closes out the unintended Azure Local VM deletion incident and unblocks Solution and SBE updates. Same-day hotfixes for 2603 and 2604 add a second layer of automated remedi...
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Azure Local moves fast, and most of the time that is a good thing. Every few weeks there is a new release, a new feature, a new way to make life on-prem feel a bit more like Azure. But once in a while the news isn’t a shiny new capability, it’s a “stop what...
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Validation passed. The build didn’t. Deploying Azure Local 2604 with Local Identity and Azure Key Vault through the portal looked straightforward — until step 0.16 hit a wall and refused to move. What followed was a six-issue deep dive into the EceStore con...
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When you restore a virtual machine on Azure Local using Azure Backup or Veeam, you get the Hyper-V workload back, but the Arc object is gone. Microsoft does not support ReHydration, meaning the VM never re-appears as an Azure Local managed machine. This pos...
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This setup is used to validate a new feature and is part of a dedicated test environment. Please note that this functionality is still in preview. More details…
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The Disaster Recovery capability for Azure Local is currently in preview, but it already offers enough functionality for meaningful evaluation and testing. Exploring this feature early provides valuable…
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Azure Local 2604 lifts a lot of historical ceilings. SAN storage and disaggregated deployments go GA, breaking the 16 node limit and letting compute and storage scale independently. GPU acceleration and Key Vault local identity reach GA too. Validation time...
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Azure Landing Zones are the foundation of secure and scalable Azure platforms, but documentation often falls behind as environments evolve. Azure Landing Zone Documenter is an open‑source tool that inspects your actual Landing Zone and turns real configurat...
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