Generally Available: Azure Stack HCI latest feature release

Azure Stack HCI is the Microsoft Azure Arc-enabled infrastructure. Now, customers who have an Azure Stack HCI subscription can download the latest feature release for their infrastructure. This new Azure Stack HCI release is the version of the product required to run Azure Virtual Desktop on- prem which is also now in GA and called Azure Virtual Desktop for Azure Stack HCI. This is an exciting development as the public preview of this product is in high demand specifically in Healthcare and Financial Services. 

In addition, customers will benefit from the following new features and enhancements:

• Cloud based life-cycle management to deploy, create, expand, and update, HCI and AKS infrastructure to host Arc VMs and AVD session host VMs with the consistency of Azure portal, Azure CLI, and ARM templates
• Azure Arc (Resource Bridge) set up automatically for provisioning VMs and provisioning Kubernetes clusters
• Templatize clusters in ARM and deploy onto minimally-configured servers
• Manage updates for Azure Stack HCI clusters from the Azure portal, including at-scale (~100s)
• Expanded VM Extensions support including Microsoft Defender for Cloud, Azure Monitor, and Azure Update Management
• New Site manager to help you organize resources in Azure Arc by location
• Annual update for core stack (hypervisor, storage, etc.) with new deduplication and compression, Trusted Launch VMs, improved GPU support

Learn more about this release by reading the tech community blog.