Sad day ..
Posted by cbw181@reddit | sysadmin | View on Reddit | 73 comments
Worked in every version of exchange since in my career started in 2004. Today, I decom'ed my company's last exchange server (moved to 365). Sort of bitter sweet - it's been a challenge lately with security but I have really enjoyed working with it.
Goodbye old friend
cantstandmyownfeed@reddit
It was a little bitter sweet when we retired ours. There was a time that being an Exchange Admin was a badge of honor. It meant you had a solid grasp of a large part of the Microsoft platform.
M365 is certainly a lot easier and more resilient, but I do miss the skill it took to maintain on-prem.
moldyjellybean@reddit
No t only that but the exchange server was actually way more reliable and way cheaper than o365.
cantstandmyownfeed@reddit
Been a while since I priced out an Exchange box, but M365 basic is $6/month. Almost positive I can't host anything locally for that much. Especially not with 100gb mail boxes for everyone, and spam filtering.
If I could, it wouldn't be as reliable as M365 exchange. I don't recall the last time we had a mail outage on M365. Plus, when M365 has issues, someone else solves them, I don't burn my hours troubleshooting. I post a message and grab a cup of coffee.
AegorBlake@reddit
$6 per month per person. I am in a company of about 13,000 state side. That would be 936,000 per year.
cantstandmyownfeed@reddit
And how much do you spend on licenses for Exchange? Hardware? Maintenance? Power? Manpower?
Couple that with the way the rest of the MS suite is bundled now, and Exchange is essentially free if you use Office at all.
thecasualmaannn@reddit
If your company can afford 13000 employees, they can definitely afford 936K per year in licensing.
MrCertainly@reddit
It costs money to run a business. You should see what the company pays in insurances, regulatory fees, taxes, rent, janitorial cleaning, etc.
Leave that nonsense to the bean counters. M365 is the sure-bet recommendation. Remember the saying "No one ever got fired going with IBM"? That's what M365 is today. Sure, you can go with on-prem or Uncle Bob's Super Duper Email Client X-treme! But, see where that gets you in a few years....especially when it shits the bed half a dozen times.
How much does downtime cost the company? How much does the OT and restoration costs add up to? Suddenly, $936k is a fucking bargain. Or not. But that's not your call to make. Your name isn't above the door, so stop caring about the company as if you owned it.
spetcnaz@reddit
You could if you don't care about licensing haha
No_Resolution_9252@reddit
Exchange server licensing has never been particularly expensive. For a time, it was the hardware. A 2 node exchange 2003 cluster for 100 users, you would be in well over 100k, at a time when 100k would buy you four top trim pickup trucks. Moving forward a few years, hardware starts to become cheaper, but then you get into cost optimizations like virtualization and storage that require other licensing and labor. Move up to about 2015 and hardware is dirt cheap, but the cost of the AD and Exchange support was monumental.
Banluil@reddit
Not even remotely. Not price, and not reliability.
99.9% of the time there is any issue with 365 exchange, it ends up being my local ISP.
The other times, it's fixed within an hour, and even then it's not completely down, maybe a few minor things that 99% of my users don't even see.
That isn't just exchange, that is the entirety of O365.
Price wise? I couldn't come close to the price point unless I ran the exchange server for 6 years. Then I MIGHT come close to what it would cost to run it onsite when you factor ALL the expenses in.
If you think it is cheaper to run it onsite, you must have under 50 people you are running for, and THEN you might get it cheaper, if you go for a cheap server, cheap storage and no warranty on it.
Brilliant-Advisor958@reddit
It comes down to scale. If you are big enough to have a data center with reduant ISPS and back up power to handle hours long power outages already. And enough storage already handle the massive mailboxes.
Sure it might be cheaper.
Intelligent_Desk7383@reddit
Honestly, I keep wondering who all the people are over at Microsoft maintaining the crazy-huge Exchange infrastructure they're dealing with now, with almost all O365 subscription owners using it?
Seems like they'd need to grab up almost any willing I.T. people who have solid on-prem Exchange Server experience?
douchecanoo@reddit
EXO backend is nothing like on-prem Exchange
dodgedy2k@reddit
I was an Exchange admin for 15 years and enjoyed it (mostly). I used to say Exchange came with its own monitoring system. USERS! Never failed some user would call me 30 seconds after something stopped working..
msalerno1965@reddit
What's scary was when I had to run an Exchange power shell command against my sub-tenant that is managed by Godaddy (don't ask).
It felt like all the same old shit on the backend.
Lipstick on a pig.
I was responsible for the underlying hardware and infrastructure of a few Exchange servers during it's existence, and the most recent versions I worked on, they were a complete disk I/O pig. Random small IO, just constantly all over the place. Drove large SANs nuts, rolled the disk cache and for local disk, rolled the HBA cache over like it was toilet paper.
Made untuned transactional Oracle databases look good by comparison.
While I abhor "cloud for cloud's sake", I wasn't unhappy when Exchange got whisped away like a bad stank.
taw20191022744@reddit
I'm not a "CLOUD EVERYTHING" type of person but frankly, Exchange is the poster child of what should be in the cloud.
rtangwai@reddit
I felt the exact opposite.
I oversaw the installation of an Exchange 4.5 server, both hardware and software.
9 years later I was working for another company that was contracted to dispose that very server.
I personally went over to take the server out of the rack and at our facility destroyed it with a sledgehammer.
My team didn't dare ask me what was wrong as I was putting in way too much effort into pounding that server into dust.
m00kysec@reddit
Yes, but think of what a great day it is for your security team!
Grrl_geek@reddit
If you have on-prem software and scanning that is too much of a PITA to configure for EXO, then ❤️❤️ to my internal relay!!
signal_lost@reddit
Time to pour a drink for the last time this admin has to fight with an EDB.
No_Resolution_9252@reddit
Exchange was my first specialization (and then through exchange AD also). I managed a lot of backups for several clients and learned a lot about the platforms involving the most problematic backups: Exchange and SQL/Sharepoint. (I swear I don't remember anything about sharepoint at all if any of my supervisors ask)
After figuring out how to get all those permanently stable, I started running low on things to do, so I started helping with a hosted exchange migration (pre office 365 and not BPOS) and became extremely good at troubleshooting RPC/HTTP and autodiscover as well. That turned into Exchange Online migrations a few months later, coming off of some of the most horrible exchange boxes imaginable and became really good at exchange itself, then did a few exchange 2013 and 2016 implementations and migrations. Learning all that PowerShell made me a wizard in early office 365 where almost nothing even a little bit complicated worked correctly in the web portal.
I enjoyed working with exchange a lot, it was the only thing I have ever worked on that I could completely control the outcome and destiny of the performance, reliability and success of an exchange deployment. We had sizing calculators to specify required resources management weren't willing to argue over skimping. Being good at exchange meant being an Expert in DNS and AD and I always ended up controlling those as well and with 2013 especially, when someone did something dumb like uncheck ipv6 on a dc or hub transport server or put google as dns and it broke something, I could immediately demonstrate the fix and absolutely tear into the moron that did it and it would never happen again.
Rustyshackilford@reddit
Man, fuck exchange.
skeeter72@reddit
You're wired different than me. I fondly remember my last day with the final on-prem server. So hungover the next day. But happy, so very happy.
midwest_pyroman@reddit
Exchange Admin since the 2000 version but not a bit sad that I no longer have to maintain the sever (sort of). Moved to my current job from an MSP. New place was trying to move to 365 and was having difficulty. Going from a 2013/2016 DAG setup that was horribly setup and maintained. Took less than a month to straighten things out getting 1000+ mailboxes migrated to 365. Decommission the 2013 the Thursday before it went EoL. Killed off the 2016 and moved to a single 2019 that provides for a management portal and smtp relay for internal apps and MFPs. Now I can patch when I feel like it, SMTP to 365 only and locked tight. Even though the mail is not on-prem the knowledge is still useful for 365 - just a lot less mental stress.
herezyZye@reddit
I still run my own exchange 2019 server for my personal email and a bunch of my friends. All my clients moved away and moved to Office 365. I dont miss having to update it :)
dmuppet@reddit
As someone who has only ever had to deal with long neglected, on the brink of failure, and exposed to numerous critical vulnerabilities running on EOL operating systems I celebrate every single one I turn down.
burghdude@reddit
Yeah, I can kinda feel you on this one. I still manage one on-prem Exchange server but it's only for recipient management since we're otherwise fully on Exchange Online via Microsoft Business Premium licenses. I just haven't worked up the gumption to power down the final Exchange server and using only PowerShell / Exchange Management Tools for recipient management.
But I also don't miss working late to apply CUs, restarting the server, then spending hours into the night trying to figure out why datastores won't mount, Exchange Online won't load, etc.
When the time finally does come for me to power off our Exchange server, I expect my attitude is going to mostly be "Smell ya later, sucker! Don't let the door hit ya where the good lord split ya!"
BitOfDifference@reddit
i wonder when they will finally support not needing the on prem one officially. We are still running on on prem just for the management part. idk why they wont fix this.
Shakespoone@reddit
I inherited an "on-prem" Exchange 2016 environment that's actually hosted on a VM cluster in an off-site private cloud, fed from a similarly "on-prem" 2012 AD DC.
I love that I am an "Exchange Admin" and get to dig into the systems. I get to do some old-school server management and actually fix a problem.
I hate that I am an "Exhange Admin" in 2024 and get to personally explain to all 400+ users why we don't "Just use O365" yet. I can never actually fix a problem, because it is the damn problem lol.
Don't even get me started on the self-hosted VoIP systems...
sharpied79@reddit
And there are a few of us lurking here who remember the joys of working with Lotus/IBM Domino/Notes
Now there was an ecosystem...
jkondas@reddit
I started my career with Exchange 2003, but performed migrations from Exchange 2000. Exchange 2007 was the first version I spent a lot of time on. Migrated one large org from Exchange 2000. Taught MOC classes on Exchange 2007 and PowerShell. Later the same with Exchange 2010 and then the following versions. Stopped working with it after Exchange 2016. Last clients running it onprem will be migrated to EXO next year.
Will I miss the problems coming with it? No.
Am I sad about all time spent learning to plan, design, implement and operate this beast of a product going to the trashcan (because "cloud is always better, you should move to SaaS")? Definitely.
I believe all engineers who invested the time to really learn about how Exchange works at least respect it somewhat.
People who never did and just wanted to keep it running hate it with a passion.
bobmlord1@reddit
I was honestly ecstatic when we moved keeping up with all the exchange vulnerabilities and issues was starting to become a headache.
Likely_a_bot@reddit
I remember the time when I thought it was possible to be an Exchange admin on the side while doing my real job.
I don't miss the days gone when seeing no new email on my phone was a source of panic and not joy.
progenyofeniac@reddit
I realize this makes me sound like a click-happy gen-z, and I'm far from that. But I've only seen Exchange management from the sidelines while spending quite a bit of time managing EXO, and I have ZERO interest in trying to manage Exchange on prem. It just seems like a never-ending headache.
But I can relate to decomming a system you've spent a long time managing. I remember turning off the first domain controller I stood up at a long-time role. Bittersweet times.
Background-Dance4142@reddit
Because it IS a never-ending headache. Last couple of years, it was an absolute joke. Not only the corrupted security updates shutting down exchange services, but the myriad of CVE's linked to them.
All in all, a total nightmare. Admins that miss it, either don't have more stacks to maintain or just love the unnecessary complexity of it, to each their own I guess.
Email services is the best one to use in the cloud. Applications, files etc that's another subject, but fucking emails ? Come on now.
pointlessone@reddit
Having worked with both for years, the only thing I miss from on prem is the speed of navigating the UI side of things. I'd give my project manager's left arm to have a cached management console.
mmiller1188@reddit
My inner conspiracy theorists wonders if Microsoft made Exchange bad on purpose to push people to 365.
ProfessionalITShark@reddit
It was bad before they even thought they could do SaaS
cbw181@reddit (OP)
Man I dunno .. i've had some issues with updates but never really anything that caused me that much trouble. I've had CU's take down exchange servers but I've always used DAG's so it wasn't a huge deal to either repair it or get another server up and running. Ever since 2016, the update process seemed to go a lot smoother. 2007 and 2010 were not so much fun so maybe that I agree with you on.
F3ndt@reddit
Question, dont you need the exchange server for mgmt purposes still?
bassdeface@reddit
Nope. Used to but no longer. Thankfully. I haven't had any on prem Exch for over 2 years now and not a single issue with user management.
F3ndt@reddit
How do you manage users exchange details in on premise environment, if you uninstall exchange during hybrid you loose the features
bassdeface@reddit
There is currently a tool to download from MS for this but I've just modify in AD attributes. Let on prem AD to sync to MS. I've done this over two years or so with countless new and changed AD accounts without issue.
ImCaffeinated_Chris@reddit
Exchange 5.5 Sendmail
Those were not fun times. Although Sendmail was kick ass.
ISeeDeadPackets@reddit
If ever there was a case of Stockholm Syndrome, this is it!
cbw181@reddit (OP)
i feel like there is some truth to this...
AnonymooseRedditor@reddit
When I started my career, a lot of my work was focussed on upgrading exchange 2000 to exchange 2003 then came 2007 2010 on up to today. I do not miss the old days of dealing with admin SD holder, permissions, blackberry enterprise servers backups complex database availability groups exchange online just works.
Gh0styD0g@reddit
I do not miss it, exchange on prem became a constant nightmare, patching the fecker was a gamble, what will the latest UC bugger up this time…
Practical-Alarm1763@reddit
You're sad you don't have to deal with Exchange On Prem Servers?
You are the polar opposite of me. I will not miss dealing with Mailbox database configurations or corruptions.
I remember the days when the Dabs got corrupted, you had to create New Mailbox DBs, then migrate all the user profiles over to them. Just thinking about it makes me.... It makes me want to.... "Rabid Dog Noises"
largos7289@reddit
Yes but you'll sleep better. Last one i worked on was 2010. I've slept like a baby ever since.
SilentMaster@reddit
You must be a glutton for punishment. The day I powered off my exchange server I ran outside and danced around the building for four hours.
realmozzarella22@reddit
thewunderbar@reddit
I could not eject email into the cloud fast enough.
cbiggers@reddit
I started on 5.5 and just we recently retired our last one. Sad day indeed.
Complex_Ostrich7981@reddit
I miss nothing about on prem exchange. The torture of waiting for mailboxes to remount after a server reboot. A pig of a system.
NaturalHabit1711@reddit
I do miss some on prem things. Don't believe cloud is always better. But exchange I never missed , jumped on cloud exchange very early. Exchange on prem is hell to manage.
Space_Goblin_Yoda@reddit
I've happily murdered almost every exchange server our MSP has managed and moved them to O365.
Am I a serial killer? Because I love it.
Literally one of the first things we do when we onboard a new client.
Am I a madman?
ElevenNotes@reddit
Same, but I refuse to use O365. I'm glad Exchange continues as a subscription model.
KStieers@reddit
Me too. Ive supported it since 5.5. Felt like Exchange 2000 SP3 was written for us (600 servers in that environment), and we had some srvers get lost due to hardware things but otherwise not the angsty mess other complain about.
DiligentPhotographer@reddit
Same, our exchange DAG is rock solid.
DeptOfOne@reddit
I left my last job where we had a exchange on premise to a new position that is full M365. I'm happy to learn a new set of skills but I do miss the ability to more on the server itself. As said before "an Exchange Admin was a badge of honor". We were a select few in that secret society.
Dreadedtrash@reddit
I took a promotion from Helpdesk guy to SysAdmin without any training. My first project that was handed to me was to upgrade and migrate our Exchange (I believe it was 2003) to Exchange 2010 on my own (was told to google for resources). It probably took longer than it should have, but I learned so much and it was a great server up until I left years later.
cbw181@reddit (OP)
I was in the same boat. My first real job was for a small business - basically their first SA. Used POP3 with a local provider and wanted Exchange. I think I bought at least 3 books (since there was no documentation on the web yet) and taught myself how Exchange worked. I think that's why it means so much more.
OverallTea737612@reddit
You definitely like doing things the hard way. Why didn't you use ChatGPT? /s
Outrageous-Insect703@reddit
Exchange Server is/was a very robust mail server, however the mgt / admin in Office 365 is much better IMO and there is far less risk in outages, etc from self hosted
The_Original_Miser@reddit
"challenge lately with security" is doing a LOT of heavy lifting there.
Luckily in my career I've never had to care and feed on-prem Exchange, and I'm thankful for that. I don't envy the folks that do or did.
vass0922@reddit
I did exchange admin and migration from 5.5 to 2003 including using a 3rd party product to allow failover to remote site
GAL sync from a large number of entities
Whiny VIPs and pseudo VIPs biting about the stupid outlook pop-up showing latency.
I was THRILLED to migrate off to another organization.
After migration we had an exchange outage.. I said I'm out bitches I'm going to lunch! lol
Then changed contracts and ended up in an environment that was in 2007 and in process to migrate to 2010 (this was in 2012), a separate 2003 place, a separate 2007 cluster and I later found about another 2007 after it crashed and people started complaining. (Long story, not relevant). Another sister 2007 instance disappeared along with it's active directory in a storage debacle..
F exchange lol
cbw181@reddit (OP)
dude .. you're like the person who hates dogs .. and dogs just flock to you just to piss you off
kelleycfc@reddit
I slept so good the first night after we decom'ed our last Exchange Server back in 2014.
DJK_CT@reddit
If you had managed a lot of Exchange 5.5 it would definitely be more sweet than bitter. Looking forward to the day.
ceantuco@reddit
can't wait to migrate to Exchange Online. 10 more months. lol
gwrabbit@reddit
We still use on-prem Exchange, and I hate it. Can't utilize KnowBe4's PhishRIP because it doesn't work with on prem solutions...Can't do Sharepoint workflows because it doesn't work with on prem, can't get our HRIS to hook into our exchange server because it throws a bunch of dumb shit errors. It's also gorging itself on 2 TB's of space.
We got hit with HAFNIUM in 2022 and you would've thought that would have been the light bulb moment of "hey, we already pay for Exchange Online, maybe we should start using it!". Nah, let's throw 10 grand at our MSP to have them rebuild it.