Dell AX System Achieves Premier Solution Status
This week at Dell Technologies World 2025, Dell announced that the Dell AX System for Azure Local has achieved Premier Solution status in the Microsoft Azure Local catalogue. If you’ve been following this blog from the beginning, you’ll know this is something I’ve been building towards since I first wrote about what Azure Stack HCI is in 2024 and outlined the different solution categories. Back then, I described the Premier Solution category as representing a necessary leap forward in how we approach solution qualification and ongoing testing. Now Dell AX has achieved that status, and I want to explain why this matters beyond just a badge on a data sheet.
What Premier Solution Means
Let me recap the context. When Azure Stack HCI 23H2 launched, Microsoft introduced three solution categories: Validated Node, Integrated System, and Premier Solution. Each category has increasingly stringent requirements for validation, testing, lifecycle management, and support integration.
The two requirements I called out specifically in that original blog were:
- Solution testing requirement: Continuously, full stack
- Full stack validation by Microsoft in their own labs
These aren’t minor commitments. Continuous full stack testing means that every update, every patch, every new feature release is tested end to end on Dell AX hardware before it reaches customers. Not just the OS update, not just the firmware, but the complete solution from disk to cloud and everything in between. And having Microsoft validate this in their own labs provides an additional layer of assurance that goes beyond what any OEM can do in isolation.
What This Looks Like in Practice
For customers, the Premier Solution status manifests in a few concrete ways.
CI/CD validated updates. When a new Azure Local update is released, it has been tested against Dell AX hardware configurations through an integrated CI/CD pipeline shared between Dell and Microsoft engineering. This means that when you click ‘update’ in the Azure portal, the update has been validated for your specific hardware configuration before it’s offered to you. The delta between a general release and an OEM-validated release is collapsed.
Deep engineering integration. Dell and Microsoft engineering teams work together on an ongoing basis to identify, reproduce, and fix issues that are specific to the Dell AX platform. This isn’t a reactive support queue, it’s a proactive engineering partnership that catches problems before they reach customers.
The Solution Builder Extension. The Dell SBE is the delivery mechanism for Dell-specific components within the Azure Local update process. Firmware updates, driver updates, Dell-specific monitoring extensions, and configuration policies are all delivered and applied through the same lifecycle management mechanism as the core Azure Local updates. Premier Solution status ensures that these SBE components are tested in concert with every Azure Local release.
Integrated support. Dell ProSupport for Azure Local provides a single point of contact for support queries, with an integrated support queue between Dell and Microsoft. If the issue is hardware, Dell handles it. If it’s software, Microsoft handles it. If it’s somewhere in between, they collaborate. The customer doesn’t need to play tennis between two support organisations trying to figure out whose problem it is.
The AX Node Portfolio
With Premier Solution status, the Dell AX node portfolio now includes several models targeting different use cases.
The AX-760 and AX-660 are the workhorses for general purpose data centre deployments, offering a balance of compute, storage, and expansion capability. The AX-7525 provides AMD EPYC based compute for workloads that benefit from high core counts and memory density. The AX-4520c is particularly interesting because it supports disaggregated storage with Dell PowerFlex, enabling customers to scale compute and storage independently.
Each of these node types is validated as part of the Premier Solution programme, which means the same CI/CD testing, the same SBE integration, and the same support experience applies regardless of which AX model you deploy.
Why I’m Excited About This
I’ll be honest, I’ve been working towards this for a long time. The evolution from selling a server with a hyperconverged OS on it, to delivering a continuously validated, full stack, hybrid cloud solution with deep engineering integration between Dell and Microsoft is something I’m genuinely proud of.
The Premier Solution status isn’t the end goal though, it’s the foundation. It provides the testing framework, the engineering relationships, and the delivery mechanisms that allow Dell to do more on top of the base platform. Future innovations in storage integration, AI workload optimisation, and edge deployment scenarios will all build on this Premier Solution foundation.
If you’re evaluating Azure Local and you want the highest level of assurance that your hardware, firmware, drivers, OS, and cloud components have been validated end to end, continuously, with deep engineering partnership between Dell and Microsoft, the Dell AX system with Premier Solution status is the way to achieve that.