What are they?
Since Azure Stack HCI is considered an Azure service, Microsoft is enabling you to run a range of workloads and capabilities that you would usually only able to run in Azure, directly on your own Azure Stack HCI on-premises and edge environments.
Check out the official article:
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-gb/azure-stack/hci/manage/azure-benefits
Why is this useful to me?
Are you still running End-of-Support SQL Server and Windows Server VMs? Do you have workloads running on 2008 / R2 & 2012 / R2 Windows and SQL Server and have no viable way to upgrade them without massive impact your business, resources and costs? Does this cause a lot of worry about the security of your business? Well with Azure Benefits you can get access to up to an additional 3 years of extended security updates, free of charge.
This is the only platform in the world where you can get extended security updates on-premises! This is truly unique to Azure Stack HCI an a huge differentiator when compared to other hyper-converged platforms.
Please see the following link for more details:
https://www.microsoft.com/en-gb/windows-server/extended-security-updates
Other Benefits
The ability to run the new Windows Server Datacenter: Azure Edition that include features like hot-patching and Automange.
Azure Policy and guest configuration, a feature that can audit or configure OS settings as code, for both host and guest machines.
How do I enable Azure Benefits?
It’s really easy and all managed though Windows Admin center or PowerShell. Once enabled for a cluster, you can enable Azure Benefits on a per VM basis.
My Thoughts
This is a truly ground breaking capability and provides a massive differentiating USP for Azure Stack HCI over other HCI solutions and hints at the future of the platform and what it’s capable of.
Azure Stack HCI isn’t just about being a performant and resilient hypervisor and storage solution, it’s future is much, much more and it’s easy to see the direction in which Microsoft is taking it.
If you want a hyper-converged solution with true hybrid cloud capabilities, and you are considering or are already investing in Azure, then Azure Stack HCI is really the only option to truly benefit from the power of the Cloud, on your terms, and in your datacenter(s).
This is just the beginning!