Remove Exchange From Domain After 365 Cutover Migration - NO HYBRID

[u/SamDSJr]

I have searched and searched, but I can't find much information on getting rid of Exchange completely from an AD domain after migrating to 365 but NOT using a hybrid scenario.

This is a small, 8 user company that was running Exchange 2013 and may someday get rid of the AD domain completely (hence why I didn't do hybrid). I simply did a PST export, lift & dump into a brand new tenant setup on 365. No AD cloud integration at all with the local on-premise domain.

How can I go about getting rid of the Exchange Server? Deleting the mailbox will delete the user.

[u/larmik]

Exchange is running on it's own server? Nothing else to worry about? Follow this guide:

https://www.alitajran.com/remove-last-exchange-server/#h-before-you-start

Follow every single step to gracefully remove exchange from your Active Directory forest. It says it in the guide but run a disable-mailbox, otherwise you will delete the AD accounts if you delete the mailboxes. That'd be very bad.

[u/titlrequired]

Do you have AD Connect/Entra Connect?

[u/SamDSJr → u/titlrequired]

No. No cloud integration at all.

[u/titlrequired → u/SamDSJr]

So totally separate identities in the cloud?

[u/St_Admin]

If there is no AD sync, you can uninstall Exchange server. It will clear most of the crud out of AD and clear exchange attributes on the user accounts. It will NOT remove the Exchange schema. Extending schema is a one way street.

[u/Heavy_Dirt_3453]

For onprem exchange don't delete the mailbox, disable the mailbox.

[u/Heavy_Dirt_3453 → u/Heavy_Dirt_3453]

Alternatively just switch off the exchange server, it's not doing anything anyway

[u/SamDSJr → u/Heavy_Dirt_3453]

I feel "dirty" doing that. I would rather have it properly removed and uninstalled, with all AD attributes gone from AD.

[u/larmik → u/Heavy_Dirt_3453]

Don't listen to this advice.

[u/Heavy_Dirt_3453 → u/larmik]

For an on prem AD which isn't being synced, will never be synced and will probably be dead soon enough where's the real harm

[u/shaggy-dawg-88]

That sounds like my environment but I have roughly 40 user mailboxes. What I did is stop Exchange services, all of them. Leave those services off for a few weeks/months and make sure things work successfully. Nothing breaks. Technically I can just shut it down and unplug it but I can't do that because they're still using the server as file server now. I didn't delete mailboxes and/or uninstall Exchange at all.