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Azure Local vs Lenovo ThinkAgile MX Certified Node comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jan 21, 2026

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
8
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Lenovo ThinkAgile MX Certif...
Ranking in HCI
26th
Average Rating
7.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
1
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 Lenovo ThinkAgile MX Certified Node is 0.8%, up from 0.4% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
HCI Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
Azure Stack HCI3.2%
Lenovo ThinkAgile MX Certified Node0.8%
Other96.0%
HCI
 

Featured Reviews

MC
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.
N_R - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Account Manager at Emirates Business Machines (EBM)
Provides a valuable concept of hyper-convergence, but its support services could be faster
The product’s most valuable feature is the concept of hyper-convergence Lenovo ThinkAgile MX Certified Node’s support services could be faster. We have been using Lenovo ThinkAgile MX Certified Node for four to five years. From the hardware perspective, it is a stable product. The product is…

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"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."
"Azure Local, formerly known as Azure Stack HCI, is gaining attention due to its offering of a cloud experience on-premises."
"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 Stack HCI has been very beneficial for disaster recovery operations, though the main data center still has a mix of infrastructure between other products."
"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."
"The solution has the latest processor."
"The most valuable feature of the solution is its ability to manage VMs."
"The integration with Azure using Azure Arc is excellent."
"The product’s most valuable feature is the concept of hyper-convergence."
 

Cons

"We faced multiple problems with the product’s stability."
"Hyper V seems to lag behind compared to VMware."
"The product's initial setup phase can be a bit complex, making it an area where improvements are required."
"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."
"A little bit of the storage architecture could be improved."
"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."
"Lenovo ThinkAgile MX Certified Node’s support services could be faster."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."
"The pricing is high compared to other tools."
"The product has competitive pricing."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
14%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Government
9%
Financial Services Firm
9%
No data available
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business4
Midsize Enterprise1
Large Enterprise3
No data available
 

Questions from the Community

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.
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...
Ask a question
Earn 20 points
 

Also Known As

No data available
Lenovo MX Certified Node, ThinkAgile MX Certified Node
 

Overview

Find out what your peers are saying about Dell Technologies, Broadcom, StarWind and others in HCI. Updated: December 2025.
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