@EldenChristensen We're a MSP. I know many of my peers that also are MSP's are likely in the same boat as me here on this. Our clients are SMB and the vast majority are hybrid, using M365 BP sku's and at least one on-prem Windows Server (running as a guest on top of Hyper-V Server) due to variety of reasons. We have intentionally rebuilt their networks from whatever it was at onboarding into a platform where their physical server(s) (most are single hosts) are running Hyper-V Server and their original server OS is virtualized onto said host (even if they only have a single server os). We do this for portability between hardware during upgrades, for testing of software upgrade process on key LOB apps, and also for fast recovery of disasters; be it hardware or something awful like a crypto attack.
For our own practice as it relates to how we deploy client infrastructure, our entire internal stack (including scripting, backups and management capabilities) rely on Hyper-V server on each and every server we manage. NONE of these are candidates for Azure Stack HCI for the following reasons: Cost, and minimum hardware requirements (need multiple servers, etc). The pricing structure of adding $10/core/month is a huge price increase (from zero) for these SMB clients when this adds no value over what they can do with alternative offerings that are still free. The ability to just use Server OS with HV role installed is a non-starter as well, as that opens up a large attack surface that is not otherwise needed (something you should be mindful of) as well as potential performance penalties that it will also introduce.
Your decision on this has a pretty substantial impact on our long term plans as it relates to pushing the MS ecosystem. Our clients trust and buy/use whatever we advise them to (being their trusted technology advisors) and as a result we now have to evaluate what we do long term as this impacts our clients and also us (which by extension will impact them further). I can say right off the bat that killing Hyper-V Server will not force people into Stack HCI/Azure-itself. That is a miscalculation. We will move to VMWare or more likely to XCP-ng and by extension so will ALL of our customers over time. This also by osmosis causes us all to look at other competitors for things beyond just the Hypervisor too.
Small fish become big fish, and companies that will now have to use a competitor stack (vmware or otherwise) are not going to later move to MS as they grow; that's an incorrect assumption. I think this is something you guys perhaps did not think about. The Hyper-V Server platform is the entry into the entire infrastructure side of your ecosystem and has a low friction pathway to Azure as they grow. Taking that away ensures that future Azure business will not materialize since once on another platform you cannot easily change it.
I think the solution here is to have Azure Stack be free in some capacity; your goal is to get this out there and adopted right? That solves all problems I mentioned. One sku can do the basics like we did with HV Server, the other paid sku has all the bells and whistles of Azure Stack. This keeps people in the ecosystem with a no-resistance pathway to the full sku and/or Azure as they grow. Short of something like this, you're basically giving up your entire position in the infrastructure space for all SMB and also inviting competitors to encroach on unrelated services that spawn from this move... first we look at XCP-ng, and since that's open source and worked great perhaps we then look at alternatives to Azure AD or M365, etc etc etc.
Another intangible here that applies not only to the businesses out there, but also the future IT engineers just getting started, who may learn on something else now and likely not give MS a look (losing evangelists along the way by extension). Every green tech I have hired over the years were all exposed to and trained on Hyper-V systems. That will go away too as they learn on some other platform.
If there are discussions on pairing back this change, don't wait too long and please do not handicap it with less features than we can do now with HVS as it stands. Everyone else out there in the same position as we are will soon start the journey of moving platforms. It will take a long time for us and others to do out there, but once the glacier is moving it will be hard to reverse it.
I'd prefer to stay in the ecosystem and don't want to switch fwiw.
