Greetings!  We currently have an Exchange 2010 on prem environment and I have been tasked with getting us into a hybrid state with O365.  We already have the tenet portions set up, AD Sync working, etc.  My initial thought was to just use our existing Exchange 2010 servers for the hybrid role, however, upon research it appears that standing up new Exchange 2013 servers specifically as hybrid servers is the suggested route.

My main goal is to do this hybrid deployment with as little impact and change to our environment (and thus user impact) as possible.  From what I have read, I will have to change the autodiscover and ews records to point to the new Exchange 2013 servers.  Is it also the case that I will have to redirect OWA to the Exchange 2013 servers?  Is there any way to deploy Exchange 2013 hybrid servers in a way that I do not have to change owa, autodiscover, etc? 

Thanks in advance!

Hi Joe,

Based on my knowledge, we didn't need to install Exchange 2013 to perform routing.

We can just deploy an Exchange 2010-based Hybrid Deployments.

Please make sure the Exchange 2010 upgrade to SP3.

More details to see:

Hybrid Deployments

https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/gg577584(v=exchg.141).aspx

 

Thanks

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If you want to deploy Exchange 2013 servers,then they can have same owa,autodiscover etc as 2010 servers.What you will need to do is to point DNS to Exchange 2013 servers.

ATM i dont think you will need to deploy 2013 servers,since 2010 is fully supported as Mavis mentions.

Thank you for the feedback.  After investigating and talking to some people, we have decided to proceed with deploying some Exchange 2013 server specifically for hybrid role and take advantage of the Exchange 2013 hybrid edition free licenses.  We will do some testing with host files and then point our DNS to the new servers as you would for typical Exchange 2013/2010 co-existence.

Hi Joe,

Thanks for your update. I hope you have deployed the Hybrid successfully : )

If there is any question on Hybrid Setup, please don't hesitate to let us know.

If you have other questions during deploying Hybrid Setup, I suggest open a new thread so that you can get more professional and appropriate suggestions.

 

Thanks