A refresh wave bigger than the team that has to land it.
Virtualization renewal and hardware refresh land in the same budget year. The servers arrive on pallets; the clusters don't build themselves.
Four data centers, aging hosts
A national enterprise runs four data centers on five-plus-year-old hosts. The board wants one answer for the renewal and the refresh — not two projects.
Dell servers, many clusters
They standardize on Dell servers — dozens of nodes per site — and commit to Azure Local: clusters per site and per workload class, all governed with Azure.
Manual bring-up × twelve
Rack, BIOS, firmware, OS, Arc, cluster validation, AKS — per cluster, per site. Multiply by twelve and the plan turns into months of nights and weekends.
“Do it inside our walls”
Design it, deploy it, move the workloads, and run day-2 — without handing anyone outside the network the keys, and with an audit trail for every step.