Many Office 365 customers are using our hybrid deployment option since it offers the most flexible migration process, the best coexistence story, and the most seamless onboarding user experience. H...
Updated Jul 01, 2019
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Blog Post
Thanks for sharing these design considerations. Would like some clarification on the following:
"We have seen deployments where a decision is made to keep the existing Mail.Contoso.com and Autodiscover.Contoso.com pointing to a bank of Exchange 2010 servers and have a new hybrid URL, such as hybrid.Contoso.com, pointing to a couple of Exchange 2013 servers.
This is an example of an environment that did not introduce Exchange 2013 in a recommended way."
This is precisely how the Deployment Assistant recommends building out a hybrid deployment when the existing environment is 2010 and 2013 is chosen for the hybrid servers. Will the DA be updated based on this new guidance, or does this guidance trump the DA,
or....?
"Let’s forget about hybrid for a second. When you introduce Exchange 2013 into an environment you should configure coexistence in a supported way. This means that you install enough Exchange 2013 servers to handle the proxy load for all on-premises mailboxes
and point the external URL to the latest version of Exchange in the site. Again, deploy the latest version properly before you enter a hybrid configuration."
Is there an obvious benefit to moving the existing namespace to 2013 (other than reducing certificate SAN requirements)? Introducing a new hybrid.contoso.com namespace seems like it's less impactful on end users since they can continue to point to the existing
namespace, and Autodiscover internally and externally can be re-pointed to hybrid.contoso.com to meet the HCW requirements.