Azure Local: Hybrid Infrastructure and Hyperconverged Operations

Azure Local is Microsoft's hybrid, hyperconverged platform — the product formerly called Azure Stack HCI. It runs on customer-owned, **Microsoft-validated hardware**, it needs an **Azure subscription**, its control plane is **Azure Arc**, and it is **billed per physical core**. Those four facts shape every decision in this course and are stated plainly in Lesson 1. This is **Part 1 of a five-course program**, and it covers the work that happens before anyone racks a server. About **54 lessons** are arranged as an optional **prerequisite bridge** — Azure fundamentals, Microsoft Entra ID and Azure RBAC, Active Directory and DNS, PowerShell, Hyper-V, IP networking and VLANs, storage, failover clustering — followed by **nine modules**: foundations and use cases; architecture and deployment choices; readiness and sizing; identity and access; networking fundamentals; advanced networking; storage architecture; deployment preparation; and release evidence, operations preview and the readiness handoff. A motivated beginner can start at the bridge; an experienced administrator can test out of it with the diagnostic quiz and go straight to Module 1. **What the exercises are, honestly.** The course is paired with a **personal-sandbox lab pod of two Windows Server machines** — a management server running Active Directory and DNS for an isolated forest, and a host you prepare with the Hyper-V role. **Those hosted labs are in preparation and are not yet available**, so every exercise is written so that you can complete it as a documented design exercise in the meantime. Several exercises additionally need an **Azure training scope that this course does not yet provide** (resource-provider registration, role assignments, Arc onboarding); each one says so where it appears. Design exercises are submitted as **documents** and graded against the rubric. **There is no hosted Azure Local cluster in this course**, and none is provided: a real system needs validated hardware and a paid subscription. You will produce the artifacts a hybrid-infrastructure engineer actually writes — a decision canvas, a hardware-qualification record, a sizing worksheet, an IP and VLAN plan, a network-intent plan, a network-security rule set, a storage capacity plan and an applicability record — and finish with a go / go-with-conditions / no-go readiness handoff another engineer can challenge. The stated hours are a **planning estimate** built from lesson and lab minutes, not a measured figure.