Tenant

Single Tenant Vs Multi Tenant:

From an Exchange Admin perspective, We often come across the term “Multi Tenant” when Office 365 is discussed.

Many of us think that Cloud Offerings are Multi Tenant in nature and On premise models are based on Single Tenant all the time. This assumption is very wrong!

Let us explore further.

Assume that I am working as an Exchange Admin for an organization named msmessagingpro.com. The organization uses Exchange Server 2013 SP1. This company has two major LOBs as msmessaging and ldkmstech. The AD domain name is msm.com

Half of the employees need to have an email address ending with @msmessaging.com
Rest of the employees need to have an email address ending with @ldkmstech.com

In this case, I can create multiple Accepted Domains, Email Address Policies, Address Books and optionally add UPNs in the AD Domain & Trusts console to create Multi Tenancy in an On Premise AD & Exchange Setp.

In short, multiple organizational units or LOBs depending on a Single Exchange setup will result in the demand for creating Multi Tenancy even in an On Premise setup.

Let us conclude this way ….

Single Tenant:

If an Exchange or On Premise application serves a single organization or having a single accepted domain name will result in Single Tenant Setup. In other words, each customer will have a dedicated Hardware & Software setup.

Multi Tenant:

If an application or Service supports multiple organizations and multiple domain names within the same Infrastructure, we call it a Multi Tenant Architecture. The hardware & Application Infrastructure will be effectively shared among multiple customers. This forms the core concept of Cloud Computing.

SMtenant

Microsoft Office 365 has a common infrastructure which is multiple datacenters spread across various geographies and a common application provided as a “Service” to all the customers. Hence Office 365 implements the concept of Multi-Tenancy.

Hence any customer would have the email address or MS Online User ID ending with .onmicrosoft.com.
Each customer tenant is considered more like an “Organizational Unit” with corresponding accepted domain and email address policy.
Of course we can add “domain names” that an organization owns to its own tenant component. Each admin of the Office 365 tenant will have access only to his own tenant and no access to underlying hardware since Office 365 is a typical SaaS offering

In a series of articles, I would like to share my experience in the process of scaling up to Office 365. The first part of it is to create a Office 365 test Tenant which can be used for learning, providing POC to customer or testing the features of Office 365 in FastTrack mode before migration.

Office 365 – Creating the First Tenant Environment:

In order to learn or scale up in any MS product, we need a lab environment for the same. Traditionally we use a home server or workstation with a high end configuration to host VMs in Hyper-V environment to learn the technology. With Office 365, the traditional approach does not help and many admins are flummoxed about how to start the learning process. I was with the same thoughts before 18 months when I started to scale up in Office 365 to support a customer environment.

Office 365 Lab Setup:

There are three ways to have a lab setup for Office 365.

Free Trial of Office 365 Plans [E3&E5] Offered by MS
Office 365 Tenant simulation available to MPN (Microsoft Partner Network) subscribers
Office 365 subscription coupled with Azure subscription (helps in simulating migration from On Premise to Office 365)

Starting with a Free Trial of Office 365:

The following guide will provide a step by step approach (Just 3 steps) to have a test environment with the help of “Free Trial Of Office 365 Plans”

For Enterprise environment, Microsoft provides three different plans of today. (Office 365 Enterprise E1, E3 & E5).

Note: Office 365 E5 plan is released very recently which includes the options for Cloud PBX, PSTN Conferencing & BI tools on top of features offered in E3.

Click on the below link and then click on “Free Trial”. (We shall create a demo environment using Enterprise E3 plan). Refer the boxes highlighted in green for the selection.

NOTE: Unlike Microsoft Azure trial, You don’t need to provide credit card or any sort of payment information for getting the free trial of Office 365.

https://products.office.com/en-in/business/office-365-enterprise-e3-business-software

Plan1

Fill in the personal information as needed below as a first step (Step 1). You need a personal email address and a mobile no.

Note: Select the proper “region” from the drop down box highlighted in Red. This cannot be changed once the tenant has been created and this selected region decides the Microsoft datacenter in the same region / nearest datacenter in which the Office 365 mailboxes and User accounts will be kept.

The 2^nd step in the process (Step 2) is to create an Office 365 ID or a tenant as given in the image below.

Note: Choose the below information very carefully if you are planning to transition this trial tenant into production setup after testing.

The next step (Step 3) is to verify by providing a personal mobile no and then click on “Text me”.

You should receive a confirmation message in few minutes on your mobile number mentioned in the previous step. Enter the “Verification Code” and then click “Create My Account”

That’s it. We have an Office 365 tenant created. Information is provided in the below snap.

MS Cloud Pro

Site for IT Infra Professionals working on Microsoft Enterprise Applications on both Cloud & 'On-Premise' products especially on Messaging & Collaboration Services.

Single Tenant Vs Multi Tenant

Office 365 – Creating Trial Tenant Account