Forum Discussion
Remove On Premises exchange Hybrid and go fully Online
I'm in the last steps of our migration from on-premise Exchange Server 2016 to Office 365.
I am honestly very surprised that demoting your on-prem Exchange server after moving all content to the cloud is an unsupported scenario.
For me at least, reducing our on-premise Windows and Exchange server footprint was one of the major reasons for migrating to the cloud in the first place.
Keeping a resource hog and patch management nightmare like Exchange server around in order to manage my cloud email accounts seems to defeat the entire purpose of moving to the cloud in the first place.
I'll go the unsupported path, decommission the on-prem Exchange and simply manage my user accounts using the attribute editor from Active Directory Users and Computers.
The handful of instances where I had to rely on Microsoft's paid support were really not worth the bother, so nothing ventured, nothing gained, I guess?
Hello Dominik Wagner,
it is not exactly that way. Unsupported is only the scenario where you have Azure AD Connect tool synchronizing your on-premises Active Directory objects to Azure AD and also those objects are mail-enabled objects. If you don't synchronize your on-premises AD objects, for password sync etc, then you can just remove the last Exchange Server.
If on the other hand, you are on the need of synchronizing your on-premises AD objects and those are also mail-enabled objects then you should keep at least one hybrid Exchange Server on-premises. That Exchange Server, could be also a brand new Exchange 2016 with a hybrid key that you obtain from Microsoft at no cost, is not going to be any nightmare as you describe because you are not going to have any productive e-mail objects, like mailboxes, on that server. Either the cumulative updates should not be installed so often like in a production server because that server is there only for management purposes and does not host any critical e-mails objects. Either if that server gets destroyed or doesn't boot after a failed configuration-update it does not matter. Just install a new one and we are back in the game.
Please allow me to answer all your considerations if more exist.
Have a nice day mate
Kind regards,
Spikar
Hi Spikar,
thanks for your clarification.
Regardless, I've since removed the on-prem Exchange last Friday and haven't yet experienced any issues.
I'll keep using the AD attribute editor to modify email addresses. Since we're talking about 28 mailboxes in total, I should be able to handle it without creating any conflicts.
Should I encounter any insurmountable problems, I guess I can always simply add an Exchange server back to our domain.
Regards,
Dominik
Dominik Wagner exactly!
I don't think you are going to face any problems/issues/difficulties if you know what are you doing, which I think so :-)
But you are definitely right, if you encounter any insurmountable problems you can easily install an Exchange Server an check the problems from Exchange sight.
Just keep in mind after the installation of an Exchange server the Active Directory SCP is going to be updated/created and the outlook clients on domain-joined computers will try to connect to the on-premises Exchange server in the autodiscovery process to locate the mailbox of the user. After the installation set the Service Connection Point to $null
Get-ClientAccessServer -Identity $NAME$ | Set-ClientAccessServer -AutoDiscoverServiceInternalUri $null
Have a nice day