Multiple Cloud Extenders for Exchange Integration
Information about using multiple instances of the Cloud Extender® for integration with Exchange.
- In a large Exchange environment, you require multiple Cloud Extenders to discover
devices from a subset of mailbox environments. Use regional Cloud Extenders to work against
regional mailbox servers.
Example: An environment contains 8000 mailboxes in North America, 5000 mailboxes in Europe, and 6000 mailboxes in Asia. All regions use Exchange 2013. In this scenario, use three Cloud Extenders, one Cloud Extender for each region.
- You are using multiple versions of Exchange and need to integrate with all the versions of
Exchange that you are using.
Example: You are migrating from an Exchange 2010 mail environment to an Office 365 mail environment. You have 500 mailboxes on the Exchange 2010 environment and 9500 mailboxes on the Office 365 environment. In this scenario, use two Cloud Extenders, one Cloud Extender for Exchange 2010 and one Cloud Extender for Office 365 with multiple service accounts.
Use the Cloud Extender Scaling Tool at to determine the number of Cloud Extenders that you require for your environment. The scaling tool completes the device discovery script within 30 minutes. Depending on your environment, regional Cloud Extenders might be required to avoid latency issues.
Multiple Cloud Extender support for Office 365 integration in large environments
If your Office 365 environment uses several mailboxes that contain over 10,000 devices, one Cloud Extender might take a significant amount of time to scan the environment from a device discovery standpoint, even if you configured several service accounts. The amount of time to scan the environment is even more critical if you enabled Auto-Quarantine on Office 365 and you must quickly discover new devices. Office 365 also imposes throttling limitations on PowerShell commands that can increase scan times in large environments.
- The first Cloud Extender that is installed against Office 365 is the primary Cloud Extender.
- The primary Cloud Extender receives a list of all mailboxes and the devices in those mailboxes. This list is named the primary mailbox list.
- Any additional Cloud Extender that is installed against Office 365 assumes a non-primary role.
- The primary Cloud Extender splits the primary mailbox list into equal portions based on the total number of Cloud Extenders.
- Each Cloud Extender receives its own list and works only with those mailboxes for device discovery and actions.
- If the primary Cloud Extender is offline, one of the non-primary Cloud Extenders automatically assumes the primary Cloud Extender status (within 24 hours). The primary Cloud Extender is responsible for enabling Auto-Quarantine in the environment. An action in the MaaS360 Portal forces which non-primary Cloud Extender becomes the new primary Cloud Extender.
When the administrator configures the Cloud Extenders for Office 365 integration, the administrator must also configure unique service accounts for each Cloud Extender. The Cloud Extender displays a warning if the administrator tries to use a service account that is already in use on another Cloud Extender.
All the service accounts that are used across the Cloud Extender setups can communicate in parallel with Office 365, adding to the concurrent sessions currently running as part of the existing Cloud Extender setup. However, the tenant budget remains the same and setting up multiple Cloud Extenders does not alter this budget. You still set the total number of service accounts and concurrent sessions that are used according to the environmental restrictions to make sure that throttling errors do not occur.