Thursday, April 10, 2014

Office 365 DNS Records Management a Quick Overview

When you plan to migrate to Office 365 the first thing you would do choose the best plan for your need and to make this ease Microsoft team created few tools which will allow you to compare various plans available and select the best one, review my earlier blog post " Overview of Office 365 Plan Selector Tool " to get to know the tools available. Once you select the plan next you will add the domain you would like to use with Office 365 and verify it, Then your next major task is to configure the External DNS Entries for the domain with the DNS hosting provider with respect to the service you chose to use which is mainly Exchange Online, Lync Online and SharePoint Online.


Microsoft team already made this task easy for customers if they want to use the domain that is already registered with "Go Daddy" in simple steps and if they don't have one they can buy it and set it up at ease, If you already have a DNS hosting provider you can create the DNS records manually and continue to use the service. Microsoft team published the below walk through post when you plan to manage the DNS records with some known DNS providers with guided steps and also you can follow the general instructions provided if your DNS hosting provider is not listed.


This automated DNS setup from the portal is applicable for fully cloud deployments and if you are a Hybrid customer then you will need to create the DNS entries manually per your environment setup by either pointing the appropriate DNS endpoint to the Hybrid server or the LB VIP of the Hybrid server for Autodiscover.

Below Office Blog discuss on the benefits of using this automated DNS record setup by allowing Office 365 to manage the DNS records for the customer  How Office 365 manages DNS records

This quick video shows the demo on this process: Easily bring your custom domain to Office 365 with GoDaddy

Also take a quick look at the below SharePointPro post updating the above said process in a real time scenario updated by MVP Todd Baginski

How to Quickly Transfer Your Own Domain Email to Exchange Online

Below is the quick preview of the required DNS entries that will be automatically created when you allow Office 365 to manage your DNS using automated setup and these DNS records remains the same for the domain even if you chose to setup manually with your DNS hosting provider.


Once DNS records are created you can verify the same by accessing GO Daddy website.

If you have additional domains in your environment you can setup the MX, SPF and MSOID records alone for the domains now, wherein you have the AUTOD feature which will take any one of the Primary domain you designate for Autodiscover and removes the requirement of having multiple Autodiscover DNS CNAME records for all the additional domains used, provided you are adopting Exchange Hybrid Deployment.

*Today One of our renowned MVP Peter Schmidt wrote an excellent script which easily verifies whether all the required DNS entries are created for the domain to use the Office 365 Service, I downloaded and tested this script and it worked great.

Know more and obtain the script here: Script to validate your Office 365 DNS records

Few vital Guidelines of the DNS setup for Office 365

* Autodiscover A Record should be pointing to the Hybrid Server both Internally and Externally in a Hybrid deployment.

*MX Records should not be generic and should use the new Guidelines provided by Microsoft, Example: Domain-com.mail.eo.outlook.com

*Lyncdiscover record should be created only in External DNS if you are using Lync Online.

*MSOID CNAME record needs to be created for each domain that authenticates with Office 365  in External DNS pointing to clientconfig.microsoftonline-p.net , ensure that no typo error occur when you set the Record.

* Once DNS is setup use the Exchange Remote Connectivity Analyzer test to validate the DNS records and make necessary changes accordingly if any issues detected.

Update:

Additionally review the below Article when you are using Windows-based DNS.

Create DNS records for Office 365 using Windows-based DNS

No comments:

Post a Comment