Questions on hosting on-prem exchange server on Azure virtualized environment

[Newlife]

Hi Community, 

One of our customer raised the below query:

Environment:

3 x On-prem Exchange Servers on DAG

Exchange Hybrid is in place.

All the mailboxes are migrated to Office 365.

Plan:

On-prem AD will still be there.

Going to decommission the existing Hybrid deployment as all the mailboxes are already migrated to Office 365.

According to Microsoft recommendation going to keep one on-prem exchange server to manage exchange related attributes.

Question:

Can we keep on-prem exchange server in Azure virtualized environment in order to manage Exchange attributes after decommissioning Exchange Hybrid environment?

Is this supported by Microsoft?

Many thanks in advance?

[#2]

Hi@Newlife 

It is possible, you would have the choice of a classic on-premises hybrid connectivity with Office 365,  or a pure cloud deployment with Office 365.

You use Exchange to have more control over your environment for rules and etc.  So you can use a VM on azure but It’s also true that the economics of running an application like Exchange on a cloud platform that charges through resource consumption is unproven for clients.

Office 365 has been successful because it is able to charge a simple monthly fee per mailbox that varies according to available features or license. 

But Azure charges for resources like CPU, network, and disk consumption plus the virtual machines that you want to use. It’s interesting to have a look at the Azure online pricing calculator to try and figure out how much some production Exchange servers might cost for your client.

Thank you

Dav,