Send mail to Office 365 via an Exchange Server hosted in Azure

24th of February, 2017 / / No Comments

Those of you who have attempted to send mail to Office 365 from Azure know that sending outbound mail directly from an email server hosted in Azure is not supported due to elastic nature of public cloud service IPs and the potential for abuse. Therefore, the Azure IP address blocks are added to public block lists with no exceptions to this policy.
To be able to send mail from an Azure hosted email server to Office 365 you to need to send mail via a SMTP relay.… [Keep reading] “Send mail to Office 365 via an Exchange Server hosted in Azure”

Exchange Server 2016 in Azure

23rd of February, 2017 / / 13 Comments

I recently worked on a project where I had to install Exchange Server 2016 on an Azure VM and I chose a D2 sized Azure VM (2 cores, 7GB RAM) thinking that will suffice, well that was a big mistake.
The installation made it to the last step before a warning appeared informing me that the server is low on memory resources and eventually terminated the installation, leaving it incomplete.
Let this be a warning to the rest of you, choose a D3 or above sized Azure VM to save yourself a whole lot of agony.… [Keep reading] “Exchange Server 2016 in Azure”

Exchange Server 2016 install error: “Active Directory could not be contacted”

23rd of February, 2017 / / No Comments

I recently worked on a project where I had to install Exchange Server 2016 on an Azure VM and received error “Active Directory could not be contacted”.
To resolve the issue, I had to complete the following steps;

  1. Remove the Azure VM public IP address
  2. Disable IPv6 on the NICipv6-disabled
  3. Set the IPv4 DNS suffix to point to your domain. If a public address is being used it will be set to reddog.microsoft.com by default.dns-suffix

Once done the installation could proceed and Active Directory was contactable.

Enterprise Cloud Take Up Accelerating Rapidly According to New Study By McKinsey

19th of September, 2016 / / No Comments

A pair of studies published a few days ago by global management consulting firm McKinsey & Company entitled IT as a service: From build to consume show enterprise adoption of Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) services accelerating increasingly rapidly over the next two years into 2018.
Of the two, one examined the on-going migrations of 50 global businesses. The other saw a large number of CIOs, from small businesses up to Fortune 100 companies, interviewed on the progress of their transitions and the results speak for themselves.… [Keep reading] “Enterprise Cloud Take Up Accelerating Rapidly According to New Study By McKinsey”