| Machina | Azure Local | |
|---|---|---|
| Hypervisor | Yes. KVM/QEMU through libvirt; FluxVM engine optional | Hyper-V |
| Control plane | Yes. Runs on your hosts; no cloud account required (C47) | Azure portal and Azure Arc; connected by default, local control plane only in disconnected operations |
| Cluster size and HA | Yes. Fleet of hosts, HA failover with fencing, DRS, live migration, controller HA | 1 to 16 machines hyperconverged; up to 64 disaggregated; 100+ multi-rack |
| Rack / room failure domains | Partial. Hosts carry site and rack labels (C57): new VMs are steered away from a rack that already runs a member of their anti-affinity group, and a report shows whether HA could re-home a rack's VMs on the remaining hosts. An optional witness stops HA acting when the controller is cut off (C65, run on one host); no quorum between controllers, and no multi-rack drill yet | Rack-aware cluster, two racks, 1 ms round trip |
| Storage | Partial. Local disks, NFS and Atlas (separate Zyvor product): Ceph RBD, NFS, ZFS, Longhorn and a native distributed filesystem, with snapshots and backup. No iSCSI/Fibre Channel target yet | Storage Spaces Direct, plus Fibre Channel / iSCSI SAN and disaggregated designs |
| Disconnected / sovereign operation | Partial. No required cloud dependency (C47); offline join bundle for hosts; Zyvor Fleet (offline-first edge control plane) and Zyvor OTA (signed updates with rollback, offline) cover edge sites; an air-gapped guide lists every default internet touchpoint and its mirror setting, with an egress check (C58); no offline updater for Machina itself | Disconnected operations with a local Azure control plane, subject to an eligibility process |
| GPU for VMs | Partial. GPU Command Center: discovery, PCI/USB passthrough and fleet GPU rollup; Gravia (separate product) schedules fractional GPUs on Kubernetes; vGPU partitions through mediated devices on the daemon and agent, on hosts whose GPU driver supports mdev (C59); no controller API or placement awareness yet | Discrete device assignment and GPU partitioning |
| Trusted launch / confidential VMs | Partial. UEFI Secure Boot with keys enrolled and an emulated TPM 2.0 at VM create (C60); no confidential VMs (SEV-SNP/TDX) and no attestation | Trusted Launch GA; confidential VMs on AMD SEV-SNP in preview |
| Kubernetes | Partial. Opt-in native eBPF CNI, k3s bootstrap, KubeVirt inventory and migration. Kairon runs VMs as Kubernetes Machine resources on FluxVM (no pod per VM) and Zorvia manages KubeVirt. The controller can create, scale, upgrade and delete k3s clusters across enrolled hosts (opt-in, one server per cluster, C61) | AKS enabled by Arc, managed from the portal |
| Virtual desktops | Partial. Built-in RDP/VNC/SPICE consoles and desktop pools: a template cloned into numbered desktops, one per user, powered on at checkout and re-cloned on release (C63). No connection broker and no Windows multi-session | Windows 11 multi-session through Azure Virtual Desktop |
| VM network security | Yes. Native eBPF VM edge, security groups, microsegmentation with signed evidence | Software-defined networking features; not covered in detail by public comparisons |
| Bare-metal provisioning | Yes. BMC power, PXE/ramdisk image deploy, join (C49 to C51) | OEM deployment tooling |
| VMware / Hyper-V / cloud migration | Yes. Transiva migrates from vSphere, Hyper-V, Nutanix, Proxmox, AWS, Azure, GCP, OCI, OpenStack and Alibaba (export, convert, deploy, scheduling). h2kvm converts VMDK/VHDX/OVA/raw and GuestKit repairs the guest offline, Windows VirtIO included. Machina imports the result via Import VM. Migration waves pace a batch and track a cutover checklist (C62) | Azure Migrate for VMware, GA; Hyper-V to Azure Local in preview |
| Backup and disaster recovery | Partial. Scheduled backups with verification and targets; Atlas two-way RBD mirroring with failback and async cross-cluster replication; backups can also be copied to S3-compatible storage at another site and size-verified, with a manual restore runbook (C64). No orchestrated failover | Azure Backup / Site Recovery through Azure |
| Management across hypervisors and clouds | Partial. Transiva discovers and moves VMs across ten platforms; Veyron is the console for Kairon/FluxVM; no Arc-style attachment of foreign estates for policy and monitoring | Azure Arc governs Azure Local, vSphere, Hyper-V, Nutanix, Proxmox, AWS, GCP and Kubernetes |
| Image marketplace | Yes. Marketplace and template catalog; Zorvia ships 43 OS templates for KubeVirt | Azure Marketplace and image gallery |
| Operations AI | Yes. Zyra AI diagnostics, root cause and approvals, with a local LLM option | Azure Monitor, Defender for Cloud and Azure Policy via Arc |
| Cost model | Yes. Per-host subscription (see subscription model); no per-core cloud fee | Per physical core host fee plus Windows licensing; cloud-connected |
Status: Yes = shipped; Partial = part of the capability ships; Planned = on the roadmap, not available; No = not offered. Each statement traces to the claims ledger.
Choose Machina when
- You want open KVM and no dependency on a hyperscaler account.
- You run a lab, branch, sovereign or air-gapped site and want a single install.
- You want eBPF network enforcement and an EC2-compatible API.
- You want a flat per-host price instead of per-core plus guest OS licensing.
Choose Azure Local when
- Your estate is Windows and Azure first, and you want one Azure portal for everything.
- You need Windows 11 multi-session desktops, SQL Server or Microsoft 365 Local on site.
- You need rack-aware clusters, SAN or disaggregated storage today.
- You want a vendor-certified hardware catalog and Microsoft support.
Test it on your own workload
The 30-day evaluation runs on one host and is the only comparison that counts.
Azure, Azure Local, Azure Arc and Hyper-V are trademarks of Microsoft Corporation. The Azure Local column reflects public documentation at the time of writing; check the vendor's current documentation and pricing before you decide.