Decommission some of the Exchange servers 2016

Question

We have 6 exchange servers and we want to decommission 3 of them.

We have a hybrid environment, we have few mailboxes in them and we plan to move them to a DB in another exchange server.

We also have some on premise DLs.

Can you please help with the steps.

Thanks

Answer 1

Hi @ Sherin John，

For information on how to retire some Exchange servers in your organization, you can refer to the following steps:

1.      Check that  the MX records and Autodiscover DNS records point to servers or Exchange Online that are still in use.

2.      Update the virtual directory.

3.      Move all mailboxes on the deactivated server, including the arbitration mailbox, to the server on hold.

4.      Delete all databases that are hosted in the server.

5.      Check to see if any Receive connectors are still in use.

6.      Check if there are Send connectors from this server.

Before you uninstall this Exchange server, you can shut down and observe for a while to see if there is a problem. If there are no problems, you can uninstall this Exchange server from Control Panel.

 

In addition, if you plan to move all users to the cloud and keep two or three Exchange servers for managing users, you can refer to scenario two in this link to retire most Exchange servers in your environment:

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

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