Office 365 Adding Local Exchange Server

[ITGURU]

I work in a school that has always had a local exchange server and upgraded in-house, currently on Exchange 2016.

At another site they are fully office 365 and want to move back to local hosted email and use Microsoft Outlook after seeing how much quicker local email is as well as various other reasons i've proved.

I know you can migrate from local exchange to office 365 by having a hybrid setup, but if they are purely office 365, can i still setup a hybrid solution so that mailboxes reside on either local exchange or 365?

has anyone done this?

[Michael]

I've never known a school to want to do such a move. There are more cons than pros in my opinion, especially -

 

- Costs (licensing) and server(s)

- Mailbox sizes

- Availability

- Management of Exchange & Security

 

E-mail should be pretty much instant (within 1-10 seconds), which should be perfectly acceptable. I would expect a local Exchange server to be faster, considering you have faster Ethernet connectivity, hence lower latency, but external mail would be exactly the same speed!

 

I'm curious to know your other reasons, as everything's pretty much cloud, cloud and more cloud on my project list. I did find this link offering options, but they're far from simple.

[Primus]

Sorry but this is madness, why on earth you'd want to try to encourage this is absolutely beyond me.

 

You are talking about a serious retrograde step - the site on O365 are doing things the right way and your school with on-prem Exchange ought to be looking at migrating their mailboxes into O365.

[ITGURU]

I've never known a school to want to do such a move. There are more cons than pros in my opinion, especially -

 

- Costs (licensing) and server(s)

- Mailbox sizes

- Availability

- Management of Exchange & Security

 

E-mail should be pretty much instant (within 1-10 seconds), which should be perfectly acceptable. I would expect a local Exchange server to be faster, considering you have faster Ethernet connectivity, hence lower latency, but external mail would be exactly the same speed!

 

I'm curious to know your other reasons, as everything's pretty much cloud, cloud and more cloud on my project list. I did find this link offering options, but they're far from simple.

reasons for local exchange:

- Proven 100% uptime and internal mail in event of MS downtime/issue

- Safe to know data is on-site and backed up - how do you backup your 365 emails?

- OWA is painfully slow especially when searching - users want to use full outlook - even connecting Outlook to 365 can be intermittent.

- Recently sent out a mailmerge to all parents for all year groups to external email addresses, took 10 minutes on local exchange via SMTP connector to non MS Service provider. Through office 365 it took 4 hours sending 1 email every 3 seconds!

- total control and management of email server

- cost is next to nothing for standard version and cals included in core desktop cals.

- all monitoring systems on-site send email via local exchange server for INSTANT notifications .getting them to send via external relay has delays and is slow. If the internet goes down how will monitoring tell me it's down if it cannot send through 365 relay.

- no control over service status - if MS have a problem - what would you do for internal communications - i.e safeguarding etc.

 

All our services where possible run in-house knowing users have 100% access during school hours and in event of any issues,they can be resolved immediately.

[ITGURU]

Sorry but this is madness, why on earth you'd want to try to encourage this is absolutely beyond me.

 

You are talking about a serious retrograde step - the site on O365 are doing things the right way and your school with on-prem Exchange ought to be looking at migrating their mailboxes into O365.

 

No thanks, don't feel safe with data in the cloud. everyone says our system runs quicker and more efficient so i'm there to provide a service.

[ITGURU]

Can understand it for primary schools or those that don't have on-site IT staff, but if you have the staff that have the knowledge and skills why not do in-house. We are also moving away from outsourcing website due to reliability. We have 100% uptime of other web services, and after issues with our hosting provider externally we are moving back in-house for that too.

[Michael]

- Surely against the probability of odds, Microsoft's datacentre is going to outperform your uptime?

 

- You can perform cloud to cloud backups, such services do exist

 

- I agree OWA is slower, but that's no huge surprise given MS Outlook stores a PST copy locally. OWA never was designed for more advanced tasks. It's a bit like typing a long letter on an iPad - it's more suitable for notes and short e-mails

 

- Mail Merge I would consider an advanced task, which you need MS Outlook as it's not possible in OWA. I question whether other factors are creating slowness, such as Local Authority mail relays, filtering or firewall rules for example. I'd be a good test to perform the same test over 4G or a home BB connection to demonstrate whether it's O365 as a service, or the routing of traffic through the likes of firewalls and/or filtering as I mentioned above.

 

- True you have more control, but also more responsibility for a public facing server

 

- Costs can be manageable depending on licensing purchased, but it's still a cost compared to Office 365 for Edu which is free whichever way you look at it

 

- I can only count one or two occasions over the last 10+ years that O365 was unavailable. O365 also has a status page for Exchange and other service statuses.

 

I wish you the best on this project, but I still think there are more pros to the likes of O365 vs. local Exchange. Granted lower latency allows internal e-mails in working hours to be sent/received fractionally/marginally faster, but anything sent/received externally, there's no benefit.

[ITGURU]

at the end of the day no one solution fits all. stems from the clunkymess of one drive and it's inefficiency when editing documents. when praised for the network you have performing as it is you follow suit and implement elsewhere.

[KK20]

We run exchange 2016 and will continue to do so. we will not run office 365 unless there is no alternative. For us an onsite solution is substantially cheaper.

 

- Costs (licensing) and server(s)

Our exchange 2016 VM is 32Gb RAM and has 8 cores assigned to it with 300Gb used out of 500Gb assigned - theoretically this is way below the "spreadsheet calclulations" in practice this is fine, the VM performance counters are more than adequate - I would also say that 2016 uses fewer resources than 2008. This is not burdensome on the overall system. Licensing costs for raw exchange server is £45 annually EES with the CAL licenses being part of the enterprise core desktop pack. Office 365 would cost MUCH more than this per user (approximately 700 mailboxes) to the tune that I could buy an R410 refurb physical server per year and still have change. We use an additional IP dedicated to exchange OWA/autodiscover/mx. SSL cert would be needed in either case, im not sure if you can script lets encrypt to work with o365, you certainly can with exchange 2016 and IIS etc.

- Mailbox sizes

average mailbox size is 300Mb. Concurrent usage is approximately 100 users.

- Availability

We have had zero downtime from our onsite exchange server (during a working day) in the 13 years I have been working here. Migration time from 2003->2008->2016 has been approximately 5 working days per upgrade - both were "online" migrations with 2008->2016 being the easiest. In comparison, we have lost internet connectivity with both our primary and backup lines on a number of occasions due to factors beyond our control (dissimilar tech but both route through the same main exchange which has had downtime). The VM is located on our 4 node cluster (stretched between two live replication "sites" on our premesis - junior and senior school parts of the complex).

 

mobile or external devices connect the same to our exchange as they would to o365. Obviously if our primary and secondard lines went down then external connectivity would be an issue. It is more of an issue for onsite people to lose connectivity to exchange though.

- Management of Exchange & Security

Server is patched and runs to best practice, not much more can be said really. Management is no more onerous than o365 I think. I know you can powershell o365 so our scripts that auto-create certain pupil accounts on MIS changes would still work.

 

Other notes:

Backups

Online backups of o365 does exist yes, but the cost is quite high (from what I saw). What I have not seen is someone retore from 3rd party backups to o365 so I cannot comment (though it was veeam I looked at so I would guess seamless - we use veeam for our main backup solution). Out of interest, what is the speed of restore associated with o365? What about retention, day/week/month etc (and extra cost for this - do you backup to azure instance or third party online storage)? We use backupassist local backup (was about £100 at the time some years ago) and offers mailbox backup/restore. I have used this restore and it is a few clicks with no downtime. Backups are stored daily (week) on our fast backup storage, weekly on NAS rotating and monthly on "old NAS" with rotating. Cost associated with backup is substantially cheaper than online o365 storage options I have seen, the onsite cost is also spread between our other onsite backups.

 

Overally I would not discount people who want to retain onsite exchange.

Edited November 13, 2018 by KK20

[chaplic]

I share the others bafflement with your approach, I don't doubt for a second you are providing an excellent service but I hope those around you and those that follow you can too. Exchange is such a complex beast, I say that as my first email project was msmail-> Exchange 4 migraton and then all the way through.

 

However, to the question in hand. You can only move the mailboxes back to the source AD/ Forest where they came from. It might be possible to align an AD user account in your forest to the o365 account and tweak exchange attributes so it was happy to move it "back" but that's super hacky.

 

Fortunately, it's quite easy to export email in o365, so a depending on what you want to do with domain names migrations can be reasonably straightforward.

[ITGURU]

We run exchange 2016 and will continue to do so. we will not run office 365 unless there is no alternative. For us an onsite solution is substantially cheaper.

 

- Costs (licensing) and server(s)

Our exchange 2016 VM is 32Gb RAM and has 8 cores assigned to it with 300Gb used out of 500Gb assigned - theoretically this is way below the "spreadsheet calclulations" in practice this is fine, the VM performance counters are more than adequate - I would also say that 2016 uses fewer resources than 2008. This is not burdensome on the overall system. Licensing costs for raw exchange server is £45 annually EES with the CAL licenses being part of the enterprise core desktop pack. Office 365 would cost MUCH more than this per user (approximately 700 mailboxes) to the tune that I could buy an R410 refurb physical server per year and still have change. We use an additional IP dedicated to exchange OWA/autodiscover/mx. SSL cert would be needed in either case, im not sure if you can script lets encrypt to work with o365, you certainly can with exchange 2016 and IIS etc.

- Mailbox sizes

average mailbox size is 300Mb. Concurrent usage is approximately 100 users.

- Availability

We have had zero downtime from our onsite exchange server (during a working day) in the 13 years I have been working here. Migration time from 2003->2008->2016 has been approximately 5 working days per upgrade - both were "online" migrations with 2008->2016 being the easiest. In comparison, we have lost internet connectivity with both our primary and backup lines on a number of occasions due to factors beyond our control (dissimilar tech but both route through the same main exchange which has had downtime). The VM is located on our 4 node cluster (stretched between two live replication "sites" on our premesis - junior and senior school parts of the complex).

 

mobile or external devices connect the same to our exchange as they would to o365. Obviously if our primary and secondard lines went down then external connectivity would be an issue. It is more of an issue for onsite people to lose connectivity to exchange though.

- Management of Exchange & Security

Server is patched and runs to best practice, not much more can be said really. Management is no more onerous than o365 I think. I know you can powershell o365 so our scripts that auto-create certain pupil accounts on MIS changes would still work.

 

Other notes:

Backups

Online backups of o365 does exist yes, but the cost is quite high (from what I saw). What I have not seen is someone retore from 3rd party backups to o365 so I cannot comment (though it was veeam I looked at so I would guess seamless - we use veeam for our main backup solution). Out of interest, what is the speed of restore associated with o365? What about retention, day/week/month etc (and extra cost for this - do you backup to azure instance or third party online storage)? We use backupassist local backup (was about £100 at the time some years ago) and offers mailbox backup/restore. I have used this restore and it is a few clicks with no downtime. Backups are stored daily (week) on our fast backup storage, weekly on NAS rotating and monthly on "old NAS" with rotating. Cost associated with backup is substantially cheaper than online o365 storage options I have seen, the onsite cost is also spread between our other onsite backups.

 

Overally I would not discount people who want to retain onsite exchange.

I'm with you on this one totally! will exchange locally for as long as I can!

[jb2201]

I’m struggling to see how Exchange is the cheaper option for schools? Office 365 is free to education.

[Soulfish]

I don't work in education anymore, but I'm responsible for all collaboration services (including email) at a large 90k user company with offices around the world and thought I'd chip in with my viewpoint. We run all email out of O365, and don't operate on-prem Exchange at all (not even a hybrid environment). We don't backup O365 - that's what our SLA with MS is for, and yes we have had them restore over 200TB of SharePoint data before. I trust MS to run our email (and collaboration) systems better then we ever could.

 

When I was in education I pushed to migrate email to O365 - for me it's a no brainer given the lower costs and higher uptime that MS can achieve.

[ITGURU]

I don't work in education anymore, but I'm responsible for all collaboration services (including email) at a large 90k user company with offices around the world and thought I'd chip in with my viewpoint. We run all email out of O365, and don't operate on-prem Exchange at all (not even a hybrid environment). We don't backup O365 - that's what our SLA with MS is for, and yes we have had them restore over 200TB of SharePoint data before. I trust MS to run our email (and collaboration) systems better then we ever could.

 

When I was in education I pushed to migrate email to O365 - for me it's a no brainer given the lower costs and higher uptime that MS can achieve.

 

How can MS achieve a higher uptime than on-prem? I've got higher uptime on our exchange server in-house than our external web hosting provider! exchange just runs and runs..

[Blue_Cookeh]

How can MS achieve a higher uptime than on-prem? I've got higher uptime on our exchange server in-house than our external web hosting provider! exchange just runs and runs..

 

With the risk of a mod giving me a warning... is this entire thread a troll?

 

Microsoft has infinitely more resources in their datacenters at their disposal than the largest organisations on this planet. When a server in their DC dies, they don't notice. Your school is a tiny fish in a gigantic pond. We've been using Office365 since it was originally introduced as Live@Edu and we've seen 0, yes, ZERO downtime on our mail service.

 

You're making a huge mistake.

Edited November 16, 2018 by Blue_Cookeh

[ITGURU]

With the risk of a mod giving me a warning... is this entire thread a troll?

 

Microsoft has infinitely more resources in their datacenters at their disposal than the largest organisations on this planet. When a server in their DC dies, they don't notice. Your school is a tiny fish in a gigantic pond. We've been using Office365 since it was originally introduced as Live@Edu and we've seen 0, yes, ZERO downtime on our mail service.

 

You're making a huge mistake.

 

Isn't that why they made DAG for high availability

[Blue_Cookeh]

DAG doesn't fix your Internet connection going down, or your UPS not providing enough uptime, or your Exchange database filling the disk, or your core switch dying, or your server room flooding, or whatever happens.

 

Why would you go through the hassle of hosting an (or multiple) on premise Exchange servers when you could farm it out to Microsoft for free? All of the reasons you've posted in this thread can be countered and mitigated in 15 minutes.

 

If you truly are having the problems you listed r.e. things like Outlook connectivity to Office365 then you have some serious problems elsewhere on your network or user's computers.

Edited November 16, 2018 by Blue_Cookeh

[ITGURU]

DAG doesn't fix your Internet connection going down, or your UPS not providing enough uptime, or your Exchange database filling the disk, or your core switch dying, or your server room flooding, or whatever happens.

 

Why would you go through the hassle of hosting an (or multiple) on premise Exchange servers when you could farm it out to Microsoft for free? All of the reasons you've posted in this thread can be countered and mitigated in 15 minutes.

 

If you truly are having the problems you listed r.e. things like Outlook connectivity to Office365 then you have some serious problems elsewhere on your network or user's computers.

 

so if the school loses their internet connection as only have a single circuit, how do they send internal email? if my internet goes down i'll still have full internal mail access.

[Blue_Cookeh]

Do you really rely on e-mail internally that much?

 

I'd be *really* surprised if the fact people couldn't access the Internet was a higher priority. I worked for an 80,000 employee Telco and we were shifting to Office365, even the NHS are using Office365 for various services.

 

I think you're overthinking the requirements of your environment personally but at the end of the day that's what they're paying *you* for and not me

[ITGURU]

Do you really rely on e-mail internally that much?

 

I'd be *really* surprised if the fact people couldn't access the Internet was a higher priority. I worked for an 80,000 employee Telco and we were shifting to Office365, even the NHS are using Office365 for various services.

 

I think you're overthinking the requirements of your environment personally but at the end of the day that's what they're paying *you* for and not me

 

Yep paid to do a job and do it well. Stick everything in the cloud and no one will need IT staff as if anything goes wrong, it'll be down to the service provider!!

[Blue_Cookeh]

That's why you go and work for mega $$$ at the service provider!

[HPlum78]

~300k exchange servers in the MS O365 environment, and a wealth of experience and knowledge running that environment. I dont doubt you guys run a good service on prem but I take the 100% up time statement with a pinch of salt. I also question the cost analysis of running exchange on prem. Others have covered some of the benifits of cloud for exchange (mail service), i want to say more but...

[ITGURU]

~300k exchange servers in the MS O365 environment, and a wealth of experience and knowledge running that environment. I dont doubt you guys run a good service on prem but I take the 100% up time statement with a pinch of salt. I also question the cost analysis of running exchange on prem. Others have covered some of the benifits of cloud for exchange (mail service), i want to say more but...

 

but each to their own preference!!

[HPlum78]

Concentrate on being transformational you cannot do that while running a mail service on prem. You have (should have) bigger fish to fry than having to maintain an on prem mail service surly? I am not saying pick your data center up and port it to a cloud provider, I am saying pick your fights. Also the argument about not needing IT staff if you use cloud services is flawed.

[Wubbalubbadub]

~300k exchange servers in the MS O365 environment, and a wealth of experience and knowledge running that environment. I dont doubt you guys run a good service on prem but I take the 100% up time statement with a pinch of salt. I also question the cost analysis of running exchange on prem. Others have covered some of the benifits of cloud for exchange (mail service), i want to say more but...

This, but i am going to say more!.... Unless you're running GCHQ... this seems like a silly idea. I'm seriously questioning your cost analysis (happy to be proven wrong though). However Education + office 365 = free

 

Your comment about internal email being up when the internet is down.. just seems mad! How many internal emails are you sending! Do you not have phones!? Also.. reliability of ISP connections only seems to be improving!

 

Sorry, but i cant help with your question, and call myself a forward thinking profesional.

 

On a more personal note, your forum name "ITGURU" just adds irony to this post!

 

Sorry, but this seems like the sort of stuff that gives us bad names. Its likely whoever proceeds you will then have to just migrate back to office 365.. Certainly the first thing i would do!

Edited November 16, 2018 by Wubbalubbadub