Possible to setup a home lab based on Azure Local?

Question

I come from MS Intune and AD & VMware background. Have some experience with Azure VMs and AVD. I watched some introduction about Azure Local and Arc and got exited, would it be possible to setup my own Azure Local on old hardware. I do have Azure subscription and I do run VMs in Azure now. I would like to attach Azure Local to it, but I own old power PC, HP Workstation with XEON CPU which was compatible to VMware ESXi.

I believe Azure Local has some hardware requirements, is it possible to tweek and override them for testing purposes? How about licenses, is it possible to use MSDN subscription for Azure Local?

Answer 1

Hi @Pavel yannara Mirochnitchenko ,

Welcome to the Microsoft Q&A Platform! Thank you for asking your question here.

It's possible to set-up own Azure Local on hardware. However, to acquire the machines that support Azure Local, you can purchase validated hardware from a Microsoft hardware partner with the operating system pre-installed. See the Azure Local Catalog for hardware options and use the sizing tool to estimate hardware requirements.

Azure Local has specific hardware requirements that must be met for deployment, which may not be fully compatible with older hardware.

Azure Local has specific licensing requirements that are separate from those of an MSDN subscription. Azure local is typically licensed based on the capacity of the hardware you are using, and you would need to acquire the appropriate licenses from Microsoft or an authorized partner. For more detailed information please refer this https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/azure-local/oem-license?view=azloc-24112

The MSDN subscription is primarily for development and testing purposes in Azure, but it does not extend to on-premises solutions like Azure Stack.

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