How and when to decommission your on-premises Exchange servers in a hybrid deployment

[Mikaelis]

I have a question. We want to decommission  our one Exchange server but I see in the Microsoft tips that we should keep last one for administration.

"If you don't have any on-premises mailbox(es), you can safely decommission most of your exchange server(s), leaving one or more for user management purposes, because the source of authority is still defined as on-premises"

Could you please advise us if we can complete remove the last our exchange server without any  management problem in the future. Do you have anybody experience with this?

Thank you in advance

[#2]

You haven't provided any details for your current and planned environment, so we cannot give you any guidance here. The article you quoted discusses all the details you need. Specific to management, if you plan to use AAD Connect/dirsync to centrally manage your users, keeping one Exchange box for management purposes is the only *supported* configuration. Doesn't mean thing won't work if you decide to remove the last Exchange box, but you'll be in unsupported configuration.

[#3]

We have 2 on-premise AD DC which are sync via AAD Connect/dirsync to Office 365 Online. We have one old exchange server (which often falling down) so we decide to migrate via hybrid migration and now we disable this migration and stops connectors. But we are wondering if we can completely remove this server or what kind of administration we can the exchange server use in practice? Thx

[#4 · Accepted solution]

So the reason why you'd want to keep at least one Exchange box is for management purposes, as mentioned above. Microsoft only supports managing Exchange related objects and attributes via the Exchange management tools, no way around it. If you are fine with being in unsupported configuration and feel comfortable performing those management tasks via PowerShell, ADUC, ADSI Edit or whichever tool you prefer, you can certainly go ahead and remove the last Exchange server too.

[#5]

Thank you very much for clarification.

[#6]

Hello,

when you say this: "Microsoft only supports the management of Exchange-related objects and attributes via Exchange management tools, with no way around this. "Is it possible to have examples of objects and attributes? Thanks in advance for your reply.

[#7]

@Mikaelis 

Yes, but please make sure not only your mailbox, also management tools. AD and DNS records