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I realize that Exchange relies heavily on AD, and I was wondering if it is possible install Exchange 2013 into an environment that is running Samba 4 as the DC?

TSG
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    Why would you go so far down the Microsoft path (Exchange) and then use Samba for DC duties? – ewwhite Jun 17 '15 at 20:03
  • I'm exploring options (including Zimbra, or just outsourcing the whole thing as hosted). I want to avoid adding MS products into the environment but users are demand Outlook+Exchange functionality – TSG Jun 17 '15 at 20:06
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    Why do you want to avoid Microsoft products? Microsoft Exchange is *by far* the industry standard mail and groupware solution with extremely robust mobile device support. There's a reason users expect it. – ewwhite Jun 17 '15 at 20:21
  • Zimbra is a very bad product. Please keep away. – Vinícius Ferrão Jun 17 '15 at 20:37
  • Why not just use Exchange Online from Office 365 if you won't use the required on-prem infrastructure to properly support an Exchange deployment? – MDMarra Jun 19 '15 at 14:01

2 Answers2

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It's impossible, at this moment, to install Exchange Server on a Samba 4 Domain Controller.

But in the future the SAMBA guys intend to support Exchange Server, but it's a lot of work to do.

You can check the status of Exchange Support through the SAMBA4 Wiki: https://wiki.samba.org/index.php/Samba/Status

And at this moment Exchange Server is described as: "Very much a work in progress".

Allan Alvaro
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Vinícius Ferrão
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We've found that Samba 4 works well as a domain controller and we're using it as our main file server and LDAP server.

But it's not Windows and although I haven't found anything official from Microsoft that says it doesn't work, I can't imagine that it would. There are just too many 'very close but not quite the same as windows' aspects of Samba.

Among other problems, installing Exchange is going to require some AD Schema changes, which this Samba.org wiki page says is problematic and therefor blocked.

Ward - Trying Codidact
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