Many are still confused about the licensing around the Exchange hybrid server required for co-existing with Office 365.
Hybrid server is not a “special” version of Exchange, but one with CAS and Hub roles in the case of Exchange 2010 and CAS and Mailbox role in the case of 2013. You are not allowed to host any mailboxes on this server. It’s only job is to be the middle man in a hybrid deployment of Office 365.
Now the main confusion is around licensing and obtaining license keys. If you have an Exchange deployment on-premise already and want to move/co-exist with O365, you need one or more Exchange 2010 SP3 or 2013 “hybrid” servers.
If the on-premise deployment is Exchange 2003, you can only use Exchange 2010 SP3 servers as hybrid (no 2013). Any deployment with Exchange 2007+ can and should (for the updated feature set) use Exchange 2013 SP1 as the hybrid server. Of course, the 2010 SP3 hybrid servers support all on-premise deployments with Exchange 2003 SP2 or higher.
If the on-premise deployment is Exchange, you can obtain the hybrid server keys for free by contacting the O365 support team. Microsoft has made it easy and you can request and obtain the hybrid key, all online – from here.
Login to the portal and request for the key.
You need to be a paying Office 365 customer though (Enterprise & no trials).
You will be notified if you are not eligible for the free hybrid keys – either because you don’t have an enterprise plan or you are a trial user.
If you need more than one hybrid servers (which you should for redundancy), you can use the same key on multiple servers.
Hope this clears the confusing around licensing hybrid servers. In short, it’s free if you are a paying enterprise customer! ;)
We have 2 huge exchange server databases (1Server) , the average mailbox size is 40 to 60GB. So we would like to use some of the 365 features, but still we would like to have the mailboxes in our server, due to expected bottleneck of internet connection.
Thanks in avance for your cooperation.
Kind Regards
Hi Uiros,
The max mailbox size is 100GB with large archives (depending on your license). You can always use Office 365 services like SharePoint, Teams etc if you have Azure AD Connect in place to sync all your users into Azure.
Thanks
actually I am confused on how you create new mailboxes using this on premises server if it does not have the mailbox role on it, currently we create a user account with a mailbox on our existing on premises Exchange server and then move the mailbox to the cloud, again I am not sure how this will work if we were to remove the mailbox role from this last single Exchange on premises server
Can i apply the hybrid license to the existing on-premise exchange server? Instead of introducing a whole new server with exchange 2013 in on-prem and assgn hybrid license.
As long as you dont host mailbox databases, that is fine Anup.
Hi,
I currently have an Exchange 2007 implementation, with 2007 Edge. I am moving to Office365 and setting up a Hybrid Deployment. I want to keep my Edge Servers to send / receive messages, but I understand they need to be Edge 2010 or 2013.
Does the hybrid key from Microsoft also allow me to implement Edges if they are used for this purpose only?
Thanks
Good article. How many hybrid serevrs are required – does it depend on number of mailboxes or just two for redudunacy is enough?
Two should be a good starting point Mombu.
You may need more if you have a large Exchange deployment and type of datacentre structure & resilience required.