Welcome to the Exchange Hosting section of the Exchange TechNet Wiki, your source for guidelines and information written by the community for the community.
This Exchange TechNet Wiki page contains information about Exchange 2010 SP1 running in hosting mode.
For the last several years, hosted service providers have used the Hosted Messaging and Collaboration (HMC) solution in order to support hosted Exchange deployments. With the release of Microsoft Exchange Server 2010 Service Pack 1, Microsoft has created a new way to support hosted Exchange deployments. Because of this, HMC 4.5 is the last HMC version that will be offered to hosted service providers.
Exchange 2010 SP1 is the first multi-tenant ready Exchange Server version that includes hosting features that will allow hosted services providers to create and manage multiple organizations in the same Active Directory forest. Exchange 2010 SP1 can be deployed using a special "/hosting" switch that installs Exchange 2010 SP1 in "Hosting Mode".
When Exchange 2010 SP1 has been installed using the "/hosting" switch, you as a hosted service provider can create "Service Plans" that makes it possible to enable and disable specific features when deploying tenant organizations. In addition, you can use "Mailbox Plans" which are templates that populate multiple user properties and assign default permissions to new or existing users by default.
When Exchange 2010 SP1 has been deployed using the "/hosting" switch, you as a hosted service provider will also have cmdlets available that aren't available in the non-hosting solution.
Bear in mind though, there are also several features and functionality that aren't available or supported in the hosting version:
For more details on what's available via the ECP, see this blog post.
Some of you might have heard of a so-called data center edition which was referred to as a special Exchange 2010 version for hosted service providers. But such an edition doesn’t exist and there are no plans to release one. Instead all the hosting specific features will be included with the “normal” on-premise (standard/enterprise edition) version of Exchange 2010 SP1. In addition, in order to use the hosting specific features, a special licensing model are required (more specifically Service Provider Licensing Agreement (SPLA) and High Volume Sales (HVS) which you can read more about here).
Guidance on how you can migrate (there will not be a direct upgrade option) from HMC 4.5 to Exchange 2010 SP1 is complete and can be downloaded via this link.
A conceptual overview of the migration planning is depicted in the following illustration taken from the "Migrating from HMC to Exchange 2010 SP1 Hosting document.
The licensing model for hosted service providers remains consistent with the model used with previous versions of Exchange. That is a hosted service provider can license Exchange via the Service Provider Licensing Agreement (SPLA) which provides user/month pricing or via High Volume Sales (HVS) which provides SPLA at steep discounts based on volume. The starting point for hosted service providers that wish to be enrolled in the SPLA or HVS model can be found here.