Decommissioning your Exchange 2010 servers in a Hybrid Deployment

Greg Taylor - EXCHANGE - With all due respect, that was a pretty quick dismissal with very little in terms of meat or rationale. Your user base has been increasingly patient in managing these hybrid scenarios. We were told a solution would be available by Q3 2020, we've been told similar things before as well.

I've expressed my frustration before on this forum, but it amazes me that your team never misses an opportunity to disappoint your user base.

It's 2021 and I'm still having to make sacrifices to deliver your product. I'm burning up a 2019 license on a downgrade so I can keep a 2016 server running, because you won't release a 2019 hybrid management license and Exchange 2016 won't install on Server 2019.

As a consultant, I've had a number of customers look at the project plan and question why we're installing Server 2016 because it seems like planned obsolescence and there's so many vendors out there who have decided to just nix exchange and manage the changes with ADSIEdit that I'm losing out on business opportunities because they're delivering the product, and they're using one less server to do it, even though it's wrong and unsupported. 

In my deployment scenarios, ECP is nothing more than an IIS site that edits the ad attributes in a supported manner, so it's a little jarring to see this Server 2016 VM demanding one full core of CPU time at idle, having it commit 15-20GB of virtual ram to keep idle application pools happy, thereby thrashing my disks for no reason, not to mention the many GB of drive space on transport/health/audit logs that bring me absolutely no value.

I'm sick of throwing more ram, more cpu, more disk, more money at my management server and it seems like I'm not the only one, so I took some action to minimize my footprint and shared it with the community. Sure, I can appreciate that you can't endorse all the actions I've taken to slim down my management server instance, but your response was dismissive and useless. Specifically, what can't you recommend? Can we disable indexing? Can we dismount all databases? Can some of those services and app pools be disabled safely? Is it dangerous for me to purge my logs on a daily basis? 

I was hoping this would be an opportunity for your team to come to the table and address a concern that we have, perhaps provide some options (maybe not the nuclear option I've come up with) - but something, anything that would alleviate the sting of how cumbersome this solution is.