Running a Microsoft enterprise stack at home?

[Yaoshi]

With Google taking away the free GSuite I'm looking at my options. O365 would seem the natural choice (paying for Google's stuff is out of the question after this and the other shenanigans) BUT I also have a personal Microsoft account under the same email address and Microsoft strongly discourages people from having a business account via O365/AAD with the same email as a personal one, as stuff can break.

How reasonable is it to spin up a self hosted Microsoft stack (Active Directory and Exchange as the bare minimum, maybe Sharepoint for on prem OneDrive for Business and ADFS for single sign on for things like HomeAssistant) at home? I've spent a good chunk of this week reading docs and it seems like a pretty deep rabbit hole, plus I don't have a lot of hardware to throw at it - but OOTH I'd be the only actual human user of the infrastructure.

Right now I'm using a modded Chromebox (i7 4600U, 8GB RAM, 256 GB SSD) as HyperV host + Windows Admin Center gateway, hosting a Domain Controller and another test server and things work smoothly (barely any CPU usage during steady state and ~3GB RAM usage - I'm genuinely surprised at how light Windows server can be). Would I be able to run Exchange and Sharepoint in the capacity I have left (yes I know Exchange 2019 is supposed to use 256GB RAM but I think MS has bigger deployments in mind when they wrote that).

Also, how tightly should I integrate Active Directory into the rest of my hardware? Right now I'm thinking of getting just the servers in the domain and leave the workstations out, logging to services with username/password as needed. Could that be made to work?

 

[Paladin]

Can you do it? Probably.
Should you? Heck no, not unless you are doing it as a learning exercise and don't care how often it blows up or you can't do basic stuff that worked on Google just fine.

It's meant for teams of people in business/enterprise environments with a lot of money to spend. You'll spend way more on licensing, time wasted and hardware than just paying for the google stuff will cost. Plus google just gave in and is letting free gsuite users migrate to free personal accounts anyway. Probably still a pain but much more manageable.

I mean, if you're even thinking about running Exchange for actual email with other people in the rest of the world, that can be really frustrating and difficult to do from a home internet connection. That alone would be a deal breaker for me.

Running it all as a test/demo/lab is one thing but for production, no way.

 

[Nulls]

I have a lot of experience with MS enterprise stack, SharePoint and Office 365 and I don't recommend running these services at home, it is not going to work and the licensing costs along even for 1 user is very expensive and requires a lot of hardware and networking.

The on-premise version of SharePoint is not One Drive for Business, it is a completely different product that does not work the same and is basically a rebrand of much older feature called MySites to One Drive but it is not the same as One Drive for business.

It does not make any sense as business move towards Office 365 and cloud services like teams to invest heavily in legacy on-premise products.

If you want to go this route then I would recommend you go with office 365, maybe get a business subscription and stick to the cloud. For identity you would want to stick to using Azure Active Directory and a cloud identity account, use Exchange Online for Email, and depending on what subscription you get you would get One Drive, SharePoint Online, Teams and etc.

Unless you really need to go the business route then I would stick with the personal account and look at setting up a custom domain for email in outlook.com, and use the personal version of One Drive and Teams.

 

[Yaoshi]

You have been unable to get hosted email from Microsoft aside from business Office 365 since several years ago, and it seems confirmed from official sources

It's kinda funny since Microsoft did allow doing just that (for free to boot) years ago - and I actually took advantage for a while before moving back to Google. Even now I can log in to Outlook.com and be taken to an empty mailbox for my custom name@domain. The admin pages needed to associate the domain's MX records with the mailbox on Microsoft's servers have long been removed so it's not like I could make use of it, sadly.

I'm probably a weird edge case at this point and I'm genuinely concerned trying to get an Office 365 plan for that domain would screw my existing Microsoft account somehow, hence why I'm considering this as an option.
When it comes to licensing, I have a huge pile of keys from my MSDN account: would be nice to actually get some use out of them.

Why is everyone so gung-ho about giving up any sort of control and go all-in to the cloud? I can understand why Microsoft pushes this, but not why everyone, including all but the biggest orgs, is comfortable with it.

 

[dcook32p]

What are you hoping to accomplish? What will you use this for? Be specific, and we can recommend a solution for you.

 

[Nulls]

You have been unable to get hosted email from Microsoft aside from business Office 365 since several years ago, and it seems confirmed from official sources

It's kinda funny since Microsoft did allow doing just that (for free to boot) years ago - and I actually took advantage for a while before moving back to Google. Even now I can log in to Outlook.com and be taken to an empty mailbox for my custom name@domain. The admin pages needed to associate the domain's MX records with the mailbox on Microsoft's servers have long been removed so it's not like I could make use of it, sadly.

I'm probably a weird edge case at this point and I'm genuinely concerned trying to get an Office 365 plan for that domain would screw my existing Microsoft account somehow, hence why I'm considering this as an option.
When it comes to licensing, I have a huge pile of keys from my MSDN account: would be nice to actually get some use out of them.

Why is everyone so gung-ho about giving up any sort of control and go all-in to the cloud? I can understand why Microsoft pushes this, but not why everyone, including all but the biggest orgs, is comfortable with it.

Office 365 personal and office 365 business are completely different and run in separate environments with separate identities. Your personal Microsoft account can not be used for a Business Office 365 account.

If you have a business email address that you associated a personal MS account with, when you sign in this support article shows exactly what happens:
https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/off ... 15e28eb7b9

If your purpose is to just mess around then get or build a hyper-v machine and create a test environment with VMs in hyper-v and don't mix your personal stuff in with it.

Most organizations don't go all in with the cloud they pick and choose what they run in the cloud depending on what makes sense when looking at things technically and economically.

 

[ahmerali]

It's not an extreme exaggeration that I purchased my home with money spent supporting and being responsible for Exchange Servers for about a decade as a freelance IT guy.

I am not sure that there is any amount of money you could offer me to do that again, for companies that have any sort of budget less than six figures.

Just my two cents. It's not worth it at all.

 

[Yaoshi]

What are you hoping to accomplish? What will you use this for? Be specific, and we can recommend a solution for you.

The main thing I want to accomplish is hosting email for my own domain with native integration - that means using the native email/calendar/contacts clients without connectors or other apps - on Windows, iOS, macOS and Android: this means something that can do Exchange ActiveSync as well as either MAPI over HTTPS or IMAP + CalDav + CardDav. It would also need to support DKIM so that my mail has a better chance not to be blocked by antispam filters.

I used to have an equivalent setup ten years ago using Dovecot, Postfix, Horde and SpamAssassin on a VPS (which I abandoned when Windows 10 added Google account integration - prior to that Windows 8 only supported contacts and calendar via ActiveSync) but now that I have licenses via MSDN for proper Exchange Server I was thinking of using the real thing.

In addition to the above I've got several servers and web services running on my LAN with multiple users (me as the human and a bunch of service accounts with different access privileges), so I was thinking this could be a chance to implement single sign-on across the infrastructure.

 

[Nulls]

What are you hoping to accomplish? What will you use this for? Be specific, and we can recommend a solution for you.

The main thing I want to accomplish is hosting email for my own domain with native integration - that means using the native email/calendar/contacts clients without connectors or other apps - on Windows, iOS, macOS and Android: this means something that can do Exchange ActiveSync as well as either MAPI over HTTPS or IMAP + CalDav + CardDav. It would also need to support DKIM so that my mail has a better chance not to be blocked by antispam filters.

I used to have an equivalent setup ten years ago using Dovecot, Postfix, Horde and SpamAssassin on a VPS (which I abandoned when Windows 10 added Google account integration - prior to that Windows 8 only supported contacts and calendar via ActiveSync) but now that I have licenses via MSDN for proper Exchange Server I was thinking of using the real thing.

In addition to the above I've got several servers and web services running on my LAN with multiple users (me as the human and a bunch of service accounts with different access privileges), so I was thinking this could be a chance to implement single sign-on across the infrastructure.

Exchange server doesn't support DKIM only Exchange Online does, so to use DKIM you will need find a 3rd party solution.

Email has changed a lot in the past couple of years and security is a much bigger deal and if you don't have everything configured correctly then your email will get quarantined/rejected or you will get compromised, could deal with brute force attacks and etc.

If you are going to proceed then my advice is to start with looking at MS preferred architecture and adapt that and research exchange architecture online and good luck.

For anyone else looking to do this and finds this thread, the best way to go would be to host on Exchange Online because you get access to a full platform that provides support for everything you need, handles security patches and updates, provides redundancy, secured networking and etc. all for a low per mailbox cost.

 

[Yaoshi]

Looks like I won’t be able to go ahead with the project after all: on a 4GB RAM VM Exchange installation fails with OutOfMemory exception…

Did not expect Exchange to be so thirsty upfront, and sadly the host has 8GB total.

 

[Andrewcw]

Why is everyone so gung-ho about giving up any sort of control and go all-in to the cloud? I can understand why Microsoft pushes this, but not why everyone, including all but the biggest orgs, is comfortable with it.

Because a lot of us had to do this. Before the Cloud. And the joke with exchange was. A 40K software package. But you need to spend 80K a year just to have someone run it. So anyone but corporate environments with big budgets could really handle it.

I mean and that was only EMAIL. In windows environments there were a lot of older email server packages out there. I ran one for the longest time. Until it got to the point it got so painful to run because some admin out there decides that he'll be by the book and follow any RBL list out there which happens to host your client's email and they block you. And nothing you can do about it.

So run one if you want to learn to really run one. But the day and age of doing so is pretty much over. If you have under 5000 users. It's cheaper to go cloud. Using my 80K for an Exchange admin cost. More likely you need 2. In case one gets sick or gives you the FU because 80K isn't enough to run your damn server. And again we're only talking about Exchange here.


You want to be pooled up with mail provider that 1) Has decent internal spam protection. 2) Large enough that Joe moron Admin won't block them thinking they're hot shit.

I use Office365 as a license. It comes with Exchange. But I do not use it. I still pay for Exchange at Rackspace as a separate email service because they have Hybrid e-mail accounts. Where i can use non-exchange e-mail. I have a bunch of Non Alias emails i want to use and it would be way more expensive to just buy a o365 license just for email.

 

[Paladin]

You wanted to run a full Microsoft enterprise stack on 8GB total RAM?



16GB is *extremely* scant for that kind of thing. 8GB for an exchange server (MS recommends 64-128GB but you might get it to install and start at least?) and 4GB for a single domain controller. 2GB for a hyper-V host (just hyper-v, not Windows Server). And I would only do that to prove I *could*, not that I should.

32GB is the bare minimum I would do for a Microsoft VM hypervisor to run Windows servers on it. If you were running Linux with a handful of containers you might get by with 8-16GB for the host but that's about it.

 

[Incarnate]

Why is everyone so gung-ho about giving up any sort of control and go all-in to the cloud? I can understand why Microsoft pushes this, but not why everyone, including all but the biggest orgs, is comfortable with it.

I'm curious. Were you running GSuite on your home server?

Most organizations, including the biggest orgs, have moved to services like O365 years ago. Managing email security, availability, storage, and backup is hard. O365 gives 100GB mailboxes. Try to manage that on-premise for thousands, tens of thousands, or hundreds of thousands of mailboxes and let me know how that goes. Backup is a beast. Same goes for SharePoint. Not to mention needing to patch and upgrade all the servers. Its virtually a no-brainer to let someone else deal with the administrative headache. It then allows your IT staff to focus on actual innovation for the business.

 

[Entegy]

Looks like I won’t be able to go ahead with the project after all: on a 4GB RAM VM Exchange installation fails with OutOfMemory exception…

Did not expect Exchange to be so thirsty upfront, and sadly the host has 8GB total.

It's 2022. 4GB is a non-starter for consumer machines, and 8GB is barely tolerable. And you expected to run Exchange on 4GB of RAM!?

Even if this was viable, you're not ready to run any of this on-premise if that is what you had to offer.

Find an online email provider that will let you use your custom domain. They've existed long before "cloud" was the buzzword du jour.

Incarnate said why businesses are using cloud services perfectly. I have too many tasks in a day to manage SharePoint, Exchange, etc. M365 is a no brainer and we're about 200 seats.

 

[semperwifi]

Just use M365. I was an Exchange architect for 10 years. You could not pay me to do it again.

 

[Yaoshi]

You wanted to run a full Microsoft enterprise stack on 8GB total RAM?



16GB is *extremely* scant for that kind of thing. 8GB for an exchange server (MS recommends 64-128GB but you might get it to install and start at least?) and 4GB for a single domain controller. 2GB for a hyper-V host (just hyper-v, not Windows Server). And I would only do that to prove I *could*, not that I should.

32GB is the bare minimum I would do for a Microsoft VM hypervisor to run Windows servers on it. If you were running Linux with a handful of containers you might get by with 8-16GB for the host but that's about it.

Is this the Ars Forums' way of calling someone a filthy casual?

Which is not wrong, mind you. "Production" in this case would be me running a bunch of services for myself in a home with 3 *nix file servers, 2 windows and 2 mac clients, to get SSO, banish NTLM and maybe run WPA Enterprise for the main WLAN, in addition to mail hosting.

I gave up on Exchange for now but kept playing around with things and now I'm labbing an AD + NextCloud with Saml SSO via ADFS setup.
As I write this the host is sitting at ~80% CPU usage with the DC VM using 1GB RAM, ADFS 1.5 GB and Ubuntu 20 LTS running OwnCloud 2.5 GB - again, Server Core is really surprising me here

 

[Paladin]

LOL, no. Just practicality. It's all good trying to cram an OS into too little RAM as an educational experience but eventually you will want to be able to run Windows Update and still be able to browse the web at the same time or whatever and it will just be slow as mud or even crash. With Server Core you can get away with a lot less RAM though. If you use Windows Admin Center you can do a lot more with less for sure. Personally, if I were gung ho to really do a lab setup and use it for actual live stuff, I would just go looking for a used Dell server with at least 32GB of RAM, 64GB really. They can be had really cheap if you look around and are willing to put in your own drives.

 

[Yaoshi]

I managed to get my hands on an used HP EliteDesk 800 G2 Mini for less than 200 bucks and it makes for a nice platform.

• Quad core Skylake 35W TDP CPU
• TPM upgradable to 2.0 spec
• Up to 32GB RAM
• NVME SSD support
• vPro and AMT for remote KVM (requires a monitor plugged though)

After a couple of hours spent upgrading Bios, Intel ME and TPM and a VGA dummy plug it turns into a respectable VM host, or even a cluster node if you pick up multiple ones. Better yet, if you run Server Core as the VM host you can use Bitlocker to encrypt everything using the TPM (no messing around with external drives or manually entering passwords to unlock the drive on reboot).

Right now I have two Server Core guests (domain controller and enterprise CA) and "manage" them and the host with Windows Admin Center (installed on the host). It works (and the VMs are using less than 2GB RAM each), but it makes me wonder what Microsoft intends for Admin Center: it's great and much more powerful than ProxMox but it does not cover nearly everything you need to manage things, so you still end up needing to use RSAT or even remote desktop/remote powershell sessions most of the time.

 

[Paladin]

I HOPE they stick to it hard. It's a great start of a useful tool and if they keep it up and push it hard as a preferred management environment it could be excellent. Imagine if it some day incorporates things like modules for MSSQL management studio and everything with some kind of virtual explorer.exe and window environment so you can simply use it to run whatever application you want that would normally require a remote desktop session or something to run/manage.