Microsoft"This is our fourth annual release since launching as a subscription service, and we’re heartened by our customers’ success keeping Azure Stack HCI up to date: over 97% of clusters are running the latest version, 22H2."
What an achievement! Usual Microsoft - fanfares and drumrolls, while not mentioning the whole truth.
Disheartened to see that the author forgot to mention (and he must know this, no doubt) the real reason behind the customers being on then current 22h2. This post was created on Februaty 1st, 2024, when both 20H2 and 21H2 were out of support. Both had last security update issued on 12/22/22 and 11/14/23 respectively. So people simply had no choice but to upgrade, and not necessarily for any new "wunderfaffe" baked into the next iteration of Stack HCI.
To me HCI is largely just glorified and repackaged Windows 2022 Server Core with Hyper-V and local admin tools removed, then the Azure admin tools forced. Using Windows 2022 Datacenter failover cluster with S2D and Arc should do all the essential features of Stack HCI.
My take that Stack HCI push by Microsoft is money driven - to get customers into the subscription model for the OS licensing.
