Azure Local vs Dell VxFlex Ready Nodes comparison

Microsoft and Dell Technologies are both solutions in the HCI category. Microsoft is ranked #13 with an average rating of 7.6, while Dell Technologies is ranked #25. Microsoft holds a 3.2% mindshare in HCI, compared to Dell Technologies’s 0.8% mindshare. Additionally, 100% of Microsoft users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 100% of Dell Technologies users who would recommend it.

Azure Local

Read 8 Azure Local reviews

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1,633 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

Dell VxFlex Ready Nodes

Read 2 Dell VxFlex Ready Nodes reviews

477 Views
477 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

Azure Local

Dell VxFlex Ready Nodes

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Jan 21, 2026

Dell VxFlex Ready Nodes and Azure Local are competing solutions in the IT infrastructure space. Dell VxFlex appears to have the upper hand in flexibility and scalability, while Azure Local excels in seamless cloud integration.

Features: Dell VxFlex Ready Nodes provide robust storage, advanced data protection, and high availability. Azure Local is noted for its easy connectivity with Azure services, enabling hybrid cloud capabilities and offering on-premises deployments of cloud-like services.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Dell VxFlex allows customized deployment with strong technical support, offering nuanced control over the hardware. Azure Local simplifies deployment through a familiar Azure ecosystem, easing the transition to hybrid solutions. Dell emphasizes bespoke technical service, whereas Azure relies on streamlined support within its cloud framework.

Pricing and ROI: Dell VxFlex Ready Nodes involve a higher initial setup cost due to hardware investments but may offer substantial long-term ROI. Azure Local's subscription-based pricing can reduce upfront costs, offering attractive ROI through scalable service delivery. The distinction lies in Dell's asset ownership model versus Azure's service-oriented approach.

To learn more, read our detailed Azure Local vs. Dell VxFlex Ready Nodes Report (Updated: December 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Azure Local vs. Dell VxFlex Ready Nodes

December 2025

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Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:

Categories and Ranking

Azure Local

Ranking in HCI

13th

Average Rating

7.6

Reviews Sentiment

5.8

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Dell VxFlex Ready Nodes

Ranking in HCI

25th

Average Rating

9.0

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Mindshare comparison

As of January 2026, in the HCI category, the mindshare of Azure Local is 3.2%, up from 1.9% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Dell VxFlex Ready Nodes is 0.8%, up from 0.5% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

HCI Market Share Distribution
Product	Market Share (%)
Azure Stack HCI	3.2%
Dell VxFlex Ready Nodes	0.8%
Other	96.0%

HCI

Featured Reviews

Martin Coloumbe

IT Solution Architect at a educational organization with 11-50 employees

Experience with seamless cost-saving capacity, though integration and support need refinement

An area that could be possibly improved with Azure Stack HCI is the stretched cluster functionality, which was included in version 23H2 for disaster recovery purposes. However, this functionality has been put on hold for the next release, and Microsoft has decided to discontinue stretched cluster technology completely, which is disappointing. They promise to bring back a significant or similar solution in a future release, but currently, there is no such functionality for stretched clusters between two sites in the latest versions of Azure Stack HCI, which poses a problem as we were looking forward to utilizing it. The integration with Azure Arc provides a unified management experience, but I find it to be fairly clunky. The integration exists, but it is not smooth or very easy to use. While they've started to integrate the two, the integration lacks maturity and makes it difficult to manage effectively. There are discrepancies between managing VMs through Azure Arc versus managing them directly, as changes made not using the Azure Arc integration are not easily reflected in Azure Arc. For instance, if I have an Arc-enabled VM and make changes to it outside the Arc interface, those changes may not be registered directly in Azure Arc, leading to issues in fully viewing the status and configuration of VMs depending on the management tool used. You either manage VMs fully through Arc or not at all because mixing the two methods results in incomplete visibility and inconsistencies.

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Al Vasek

Executive Business Development Manager, Cloud and Managed Services at Presidio Networked Solutions

Ease of acquisition, simple deployment, and priced well

The support from Dell VxFlex Ready Nodes is okay. It could be better, they have to work on their approach. The approach they have I call "pass the baton". Every manufacturer does this, such as Cisco, Dell, and Microsoft. You call in, receive a call handler, and give them your problem. The first person you talk to can never fix your problem. They just collect information. There's probably a 5 percent chance that they could fix your problem. Then they pass it off to the next person, there is a lot of passing. That's why I call it "pass the baton". The company I work for the maintenance services is at 98 percent, we receive over 50,000 incidents a month, for those customers who have support through Dell, Cisco, or someone else, 98 percent of our incidents or ticket requests get resolved by your first point of contact. We try to take out that frustration. Knowing that it's possible to fix that model. I don't think it saves them much money, because they're tying up too many resources where if they could route those incidents to the person that could fix them the first time, it would just save a lot of frustration on the customer's behalf. It would make everything a lot more efficient, and a better overall customer support image. It is a bad model that many vendors use.

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Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:

Pros

"The scalability is extremely good."

"The features of Azure Stack HCI that have proven to be the most beneficial for optimizing our company's data center operations revolve around its performance."

"Some of the best features of Azure Stack HCI are that, as we are primarily a Microsoft Windows Server organization using Microsoft Windows Server on most of our servers, we already own data center licenses for Microsoft operating systems, and the hypervisor, Azure Stack HCI, actually comes with that license, which allows us to switch from VMware to Azure Stack HCI without any additional cost, significantly reducing our operational costs, especially now that Broadcom has purchased VMware, to $0."

"The integration with Azure using Azure Arc is excellent."

"The solution has the latest processor."

"In my hybrid cloud setup, there are three features I've found very efficient. The first is software-defined networking. Similar to Azure where you create virtual networks and software load balancing, Azure Stack HCI lets you configure them with a drag-and-drop experience on the on-premises cluster. That's one of the good feature."

"Azure Local, formerly known as Azure Stack HCI, is gaining attention due to its offering of a cloud experience on-premises."

"Azure Stack HCI has been very beneficial for disaster recovery operations, though the main data center still has a mix of infrastructure between other products."

More Azure Local pros

"The most valuable features of Dell VxFlex Ready Nodes are the ease of acquisition."

"Dell EMC VxFlex Ready Nodes can support what we call a heterogeneous environment. So you can have VMware workloads, Hyper-V workloads, bare metal Red Hat workloads, Kubernetes workloads all on the same cluster. You're not pigeonholed into either all bare metal or all virtualized. So it supports basically any platform."

Cons

"We faced multiple problems with the product’s stability."

"The biggest challenge with the tool is not being able to manage everything from Microsoft Azure Portal."

"There are a lot of areas for improvement. Since I've been working very closely with this product, there are many areas, especially in software-defined networking. We had to improve multiple areas because we depended on the service fabric cluster to manage the software-defined network. That means we're already running a hypervisor inside a VM, and we're managing the control plane of the software-defined network. That's another cluster. So, multiple layers make the complexity more. So, from an operational perspective, it's very difficult to manage."

"Hyper V seems to lag behind compared to VMware."

"A little bit of the storage architecture could be improved."

"The implementation was very difficult for the operation team at that time, as the necessary skills to implement and integrate this product were not available."

"The product's initial setup phase can be a bit complex, making it an area where improvements are required."

"Dell VxFlex Ready Nodes is a little less sophisticated than some of the other solutions out there. A full-blown cloud foundation has a lot more to it."

"From a technical perspective, it's a pretty rock solid solution. I would say the only area for improvement is around its price."

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The pricing is high compared to other tools."

"The main licenses are the OS licenses, the OEM licenses, and so on. They are very much aligned with the cost of expectations. We never had any challenges with the licensing at all."

"Dell VxFlex Ready Nodes is a cheaper solution than Nutanix and HyperFlex."

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

14%

Manufacturing Company

Government

Financial Services Firm

No data available

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	4
Midsize Enterprise	1
Large Enterprise	3

No data available

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Azure Stack HCI?

The solution has the latest processor.

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Azure Stack HCI?

This solution costs €10 per core per month. The whole stack is free if you are renting Windows Server Datacenter.

See all answers

What needs improvement with Azure Stack HCI?

There could be improvements with Azure Stack HCI regarding the license and price, as they have significantly higher prices compared to other competitors. The end-to-end encryption provided by Azure...

See all answers

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Comparisons

Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) vs Azure Local

Compared 25% of the time

VMware vSAN vs Azure Local

Compared 24% of the time

VxRail vs Azure Local

Compared 7% of the time

Scale Computing Platform vs Azure Local

Compared 5% of the time

Dell PowerFlex vs Azure Local

Compared 5% of the time

More Azure Local Competitors

VxRail vs Dell VxFlex Ready Nodes

Compared 30% of the time

HPE Alletra dHCI vs Dell VxFlex Ready Nodes

Compared 20% of the time

Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) vs Dell VxFlex Ready Nodes

Compared 19% of the time

Dell PowerFlex vs Dell VxFlex Ready Nodes

Compared 16% of the time

Fujitsu PRIMEFLEX vs Dell VxFlex Ready Nodes

Compared 14% of the time

More Dell VxFlex Ready Nodes Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Azure Local

January 2026

Download Azure Local product report

Buyer's Guide

HCI

December 2025

Download Dell VxFlex Ready Nodes product report

Also Known As

No data available

VxFlex Ready Nodes

Overview

Azure Local integrates on-premises infrastructure with cloud services, offering tools for software-defined networking, Kubernetes deployment, and VM management. It ensures cost efficiency through existing Microsoft licenses and robust disaster recovery, despite some complexities in deployment.

Azure Local is designed for businesses needing a blend of local and cloud services while remaining compliant with data privacy regulations. It excels in environments demanding high computing power, software-defined networking, and seamless scaling through Azure Kubernetes Service and Azure DevOps. Although it offers excellent VM management and analytics capabilities with Microsoft Fabric, deployment complexity and operational challenges remain. Businesses looking for a robust edge computing solution find significant benefits, especially with efficient local Azure storage and advanced hardware such as the latest processors and SSDs. There are areas needing improvements like multi-cluster management, stability, and Initial setup, which can be cumbersome. Pricing can be a concern against competitors, and enhanced support and training are needed for smoother user experience.

What are the key features of Azure Local?

Software-Defined Networking: Facilitates management with drag-and-drop setup.
Kubernetes Deployment: Provides Azure Kubernetes Service for managing microservices.
VM Management: Reduces server count and enhances efficiency.
Integration with Azure Arc: Seamless collaboration with Azure Arc for hybrid deployments.
Infrastructure as Code: Utilizes Azure DevOps for deployment.
Analytics Capabilities: Microsoft Fabric enhances insights and decision-making.

What benefits should businesses expect from Azure Local?

Cost Efficiency: Leverages existing Microsoft licenses for financial savings.
Improved Disaster Recovery: Advanced edge computing features bolster resiliency.
High Performance: Enhanced by the latest processors and SSDs for demanding applications.
Seamless Cloud Integration: Smooth transition capabilities between local and cloud environments.

Azure Local finds application in sectors like manufacturing and maritime operations where robust edge computing helps in seamless data management and analytics. Factories benefit from compliance with data privacy rules while blended local and cloud services improve efficiency on ships, providing an alternative to VMware with support for virtual desktops and SQL Managed Instances.

Microsoft

VxRack FLEX and VxFlex Ready Nodes, also known as the Flex family, create a server-based SAN by combining virtualization software, known as VxFlex OS, with Dell EMC PowerEdge servers to deliver flexibility, scalability, and capacity on demand. Local storage resources are combined to create a virtual pool of block storage with varying performance tiers. The platform enables you to start small (with as little as four nodes) and scale incrementally. The Flex family provides enterprise-grade data protection, multi-tenant capabilities, and add-on enterprise features such as QoS, thin provisioning, and snapshots. VxFlex OS is the key enabler and provides an unmatched combination of performance, resiliency and flexibility to address enterprise data center needs. The unique features of VxFlex OS make it an excellent complement to Kubernetes for stateful applications, such as databases, continuous integration, logging and monitoring platforms.

Dell Technologies

Sample Customers

Information Not Available

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Buyer's Guide

Azure Local vs. Dell VxFlex Ready Nodes

December 2025

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