03/03/2015

NetworkplanningandperformancetuningforOffice365

Network planning and performance tuning for Office 365

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Topic Last Modified: 20141215

Summary: Provides information about network planning and performance tuning for Office 365.
Use this information to help you plan your network bandwidth requirements for Microsoft Office365. Once youre deployed, your needs may change over time.
Return here to fine tune and troubleshoot Office365 performance.

Network and migration planning resources for Office 365

Estimate network bandwidth requirements

Test your existing network with bandwidth calculators and tools

Best practices for network planning and improving migration performance for Office 365

Network planning reference for Office 365

Performance tuning and troubleshooting resources for Office 365

Tune Office 365 performance

Tune SharePoint Online performance

Tune Exchange Online performance

Tune Lync Online performance

Tip:
If you are part of a small business, skip all this and get started with the Office 365 Small Business setup center.

Network and migration planning for Office 365

Before you deploy for the first time or migrate to Office 365, you can use the information in these topics to estimate the bandwidth you need and then to test and
verify that you have enough bandwidth to deploy or migrate to Office 365.

Estimate network bandwidth requirements

Using Office365 may increase your organizations Internet traffic. Email traffic with an Exchange hybrid deployment and directory synchronization activity have
the most impact on bandwidth, but some organizations may notice a general increase in Internet traffic after migrating users to Office365. There are many
variables that are unique to each customer environment, as a result we can provide guidance on how to plan for bandwidth changes, but cant tell you exactly
how your bandwidth will change.
There are many variables to consider when estimating network traffic. Some of these variables include the following:
The Office365 services to which your organization has subscribed
The number of client computers in use at a time
The type of task each client computer is performing
The performance of the Internet browser software on each client computer

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The capacity of the network connections and network segments associated with each client computer
Your organizations network topology and the capacity of the various pieces of network hardware

Test your existing network with bandwidth calculators and tools

Calculators. Use these calculators to estimate network bandwidth requirements. These calculators work for onpremises as well as Office365 deployments.
Exchange Client Network Bandwidth Calculator: Estimates the bandwidth required for a specific set of Outlook, Outlook Web App, and mobile device
users in your Office365 deployment.
Lync 2010 and 2013 Bandwidth Calculator: Enter information about users and the Lync Online features you want to deploy, and the calculator helps you
determine bandwidth requirements.
OneDrive for Business synchronization calculator: Provides network bandwidth approximations based on usage patterns from user profile data.
Network tools. Test and validate your Internet bandwidth to determine download, upload, and latency constraints. These tools will help you determine the
capabilities of your network for migration as well as after youre fully deployed.
Microsoft Message Analyzer 1.1: Message Analyzer is an effective tool for troubleshooting network issues. Message Analyzer captures, displays, and
analyzes protocolbased messaging traffic and system messages. Message Analyzer also lets you import, aggregate, and analyze data from log and
trace files.
Microsoft Network Monitor 3.4: Captures network traffic and allows you to view and analyze it. Look for HTTPS/SSL timeouts that are set too low on
proxies, firewalls and router and also look for excessive retransmits.
Microsoft Remote Connectivity Analyzer: Tests connectivity in your Exchange Online environment.
Determine your download, upload, and latency between your onpremises environment and the nearest Microsoft cloud services data center.

Best practices for network planning and improving performance for Office 365
Dig a little deeper into these best practices for more information about improving your Microsoft Office365 experience.
Improve mail migration performance by carefully managing the schedule for Windows Updates. You can update your client computers in batches and
ensure that all client computers are updated before migrating to Office 365 to regulate the use of network bandwidth. For more information, see
Manually update and configure desktops for Office 365 for the latest updates.
Determine the maximum number of supported devices for a public IP address and how to load balance across multiple IP addresses. For more
information, see Network Address Translation NAT support with Office 365.
If you have a large number of shared calendars and mailboxes, you may see an increase in the number of connections from Outlook to Exchange. For
instance, the Outlook client may open up to two additional connections for each shared calendar in use. In this situation, ensure that the egress proxy
can handle the connections, or bypass the proxy for connections to Office365 for Outlook.

Network planning reference for Office 365

These topics contain detailed Office 365 network reference information.
Supported domains in Office 365
External DNS records for Office 365
Ports and protocols used by Office 365
Office 365 URLs and IP address ranges
IPv6 support in Office 365 services
Reference: Client connectivity
Reference: Content delivery networks

Performance tuning and troubleshooting for Office 365

Once you have Office365 deployed, you can optimize your performance by using the topics in this section. If you experience performance degradation you can

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also use these topics to troubleshoot issues.

Tune Office 365 performance

The Office 365 Performance Management course at the Microsoft Virtual Academy contains 11 modules across planning and troubleshooting areas including:
Office 365 performance management course introduction
Office 365 datacenters and network
Planning for Office 365 Internet capacity Exchange Online
Planning for Office 365 Internet capacity Lync Online
Planning for Office 365 Internet capacity SharePoint Online
The baselining model for Internet capacity planning
Best practices & real customer projects planning Internet capacity
Planning for Office 365 firewalls whitelisting
Performance troubleshooting process and tools used
Performance troubleshooting tests
Troubleshooting SharePoint Online customizations
Take a look at the top 10 tips for optimizing and troubleshooting your Office 365 network connectivity by Paul Collinge.
For information about using network address translation with Office 365, see Network Address Translation NAT support with Office 365.

Tune SharePoint Online performance

Use these articles to fine tune SharePoint Online performance.
Introduction to performance tuning for SharePoint Online
Navigation options for SharePoint Online
Image optimization for SharePoint Online
Delay loading images and JavaScript in SharePoint Online
Minification and bundling in SharePoint Online
Using content delivery networks in SharePoint Online
Using Content Search Web Part instead of Content Query Web Part to improve performance in SharePoint Online
Capacity planning and load testing SharePoint Online
Diagnosing performance issues with SharePoint Online
Using the object cache with SharePoint Online
How to avoid getting throttled or blocked in SharePoint Online

Tune Exchange Online performance

To improve the speed of migration and reduce your organizations bandwidth constraints, consider the following:
Reduce mailbox sizes. Smaller mailbox size improves migration speed.
Use the mailbox move capabilities with an Exchange hybrid deployment. With an Exchange hybrid deployment, offline mail in the form of .OST
files does not require redownload when migrating to Exchange Online. This significantly reduces your download bandwidth requirements.
Schedule mailbox moves to occur during periods of low Internet traffic and low onpremises Exchange use. When scheduling moves, migration
requests are submitted to the mailbox replication proxy and may not take place immediately.
For more information about Exchange migration, see Exchange Online migration performance and best practices.

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Tune Lync Online performance

For information about bandwidth requirements for Lync Server 2010 conferencing, see Defining your requirements for conferencing.
These Lync Online Help articles have more information about Lync Online settings.
Set up your network for Lync Online
Troubleshooting Lync Signin Errors Administrators
You cannot connect to Lync Online, or certain features do not work, because an onpremises firewall blocks the connection

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