MS Azure Stack. It's like Azure Pack but with even more cloudiness

Microsoft announced the Azure Stack at its Ignite event earlier this month, for running something like Azure on-premises, but how does it differ from the existing Azure Pack, which kind-of does the same thing? The answer goes to the heart of how Microsoft is changing to become a cloud-first company, at least within its own …

[TheVogon]

Powered by Windows Server?

Shame then if there is no option to use Hyper-V Server which is a) completely free for all Hyper-V features, b) has a smaller attack surface, and c) requires less patching / fewer reboots.

[DougMac]

Although Hyper-V Server comes with no Virtualization License rights, so only really useful if you want to virtualize an OpenSource OS, as otherwise you'd have to license every copy of windows you'd virtualize on it, and Microsoft doesn't make it easy or cheap to license individual OSEs on a cluster. OOTH, DataCenter comes with unlimited Virtualization License rights, but costs quite a bit more, but if you do any significant windows virtualization, really becomes cost effective quite quickly.

[TheVogon]

Quite correct, but many of us have Windows OSs that are already individually licenced, or legacy *NIX OSs that we want to virtualise...

And even if you to buy need DataCentre Edition licences, it still makes more sense to run Hyper-V Server for reasons b) and c).

[Terafirma-NZ]

I think you will find it will run on Windows Server Nano like Azure does now. Thus far smaller than Hyper-V Server and much less to attack. In-fact I wouldn't be surprised if Hyper-V Server is replaced with Nano with Hyper-V enabled as the only role.

[Anonymous Coward]

Nano server is still a barebones OS, whereas Hyper-V Server is just a Hypervisor layer. What you suggest would be like running Hyper-V on a cut down Windows Server Core, rather than running Hyper-V Server itself.

Hyper-V Server is already rather small and has very few ports open by default, but hopefully will benefit from the work on Nano.