Azure

The series started with a simple question: if so many organizations are unhappy with the VMware commercial path they are on, where should they go next?

After twenty posts, the answer is clearer than ever.

For a lot of organizations, the right answer is not “stay where you are and absorb the bill.” It is also not automatically “move to Azure Local because it is Microsoft’s newest answer.” The right answer is often the platform that has been in the rack, in the OS, and in the skill set for years: Hyper-V on Windows Server 2025.

Post 19 built an automation practice around PowerShell , modules, DSC v3, CI/CD pipelines. For many organizations, that’s enough. PowerShell is native, it’s free, it covers 100% of Hyper-V functionality, and your Windows team already knows it.

But some organizations have standardized on Ansible for configuration management across Linux and Windows. Others use Terraform for all infrastructure provisioning. And some want both , Terraform for creating resources, Ansible for configuring them. The question isn’t “which tool is best” , it’s “which tool fits your team, your existing investments, and your Hyper-V use case.”

“PowerShell Returned to Its Throne” isn’t just a series tagline. It’s the architectural reality.

Every post in this series has used PowerShell for configuration, validation, and management. But there’s a difference between running scripts manually and building an automation practice. If you’re honest with yourself, most of us do the same thing: write a script, run it, tweak something, run it again, save it in a folder called “scripts-final-v3-FINAL,” and hope we remember the parameters next quarter.

This series advocates for on-premises Hyper-V with three-tier SAN architecture. But intellectual honesty , and the credibility of everything we’ve written , demands that we evaluate every option fairly. Storage Spaces Direct and Azure Local have legitimate use cases. Three-tier isn’t always the right answer.

The cost lens matters, though. For many organizations leaving VMware, the decision is not just about technical elegance. It is about whether Azure Local’s host fee and potential hardware refresh are justified, or whether reusing existing compute and existing SAN is the smarter move for the workloads they actually run.

“But what about all the cloud stuff Azure Local gets?”

It’s the first objection every decision-maker raises when you propose traditional Hyper-V over Azure Local. Azure Local comes with AKS, Azure Virtual Desktop, Azure Portal VM management, Azure Monitor, Azure Update Manager, Defender for Cloud , all integrated. How do you compete with that on standalone Hyper-V?

The answer: you don’t need Azure Local to get most of those services. Azure Arc brings much of the same Azure management plane to your existing Hyper-V infrastructure , selectively, incrementally, and without taking on the Azure Local platform fee just to reach the Azure control plane. You pick the services that add value. You skip the ones that don’t. You keep control over where the monthly bill starts.

With most my blogs, they all start with me trying to do something I have done in the past and have forgotten or with something I have never had to do and now need to do it. So, is the case with this blog. I have never had to worry about establishing an ssh connection to a Linux VM in Azure via Azure Bastion until today.

I want to start this blog by showing how to connect via Bastion using the Azure Portal first. Then move on to how to establish the connection using a native client on our local machine via Azure Bastion.