How to check the location of a Microsoft 365 tenant and mailboxes
Problem:
You would like to know the Azure region of your Microsoft 365 (Office 365) tenant and what Microsoft datacenters host your Exchange Online mailboxes.
Solution:
You can view the location of your Microsoft 365 tenant in the Microsoft 365 admin center or by accessing your Exchange Online via PowerShell and executing appropriate cmdlets. Exchange Online cmdlets will also let you find out the exact location of your mailboxes.
Use the links below to learn how to:
Locating a Microsoft 365 tenant
The Azure region of an Office 365 tenant is set when you create the tenant and pick the billing country. If you want to check its region, you can find it out:
To find the location of a Microsoft 365 tenant, you need to:
- Log in to your Microsoft 365 admin center.
- In the left menu, click Settings and choose Org settings (see Fig. 1.). If you don’t see the Settings button, click Show all at the bottom of the navigation pane first.
- Go to the Organization profile tab and select Data location from the list.
Fig. 1. Accessing the Data location information.
- The information on the tenant’s location can be found in the Data location section on the right pane (Fig. 2.).
Fig. 2. Location of your Microsoft 365 data.
To find the location of a Microsoft 365 tenant via PowerShell, you need to:
- Connect to Exchange Online by using Windows PowerShell (see this article for guidelines).
- Run Get-OrganizationalUnit | select-object OrganizationID in PowerShell. This cmdlet will return one of your tenant’s properties. The beginning of the value points to the location of your datacenter. In Fig. 3., NAMPR suggests that the tenant is located in North America. Similarly, EUR would point to an European datacenter, and so on.
Fig. 3. Finding the value of your tenant’s OrganizationId property.
Info
Microsoft 365 Azure regions cover specific countries (e.g. the UK, Japan or Germany) or entire regions (such as EMEA or APAC). Note that except for the US, datacenters allocated to a specific region may physically reside outside that region. For example, a datacenter located in Hong Kong may be assigned to India and South America regions. To learn more about Microsoft 365 data residency, visit this Microsoft’s page.
Locating an Exchange Online mailbox
Your Microsoft 365 data can be spread out across multiple datacenters in a given region. To find out the exact location of a mailbox:
- Connect to Exchange Online via Windows PowerShell.
- Execute the Get-Mailbox cmdlet in PowerShell to display a list of your Exchange Online mailboxes (Fig. 4.).
Fig. 4. A list of mailboxes hosted on Exchange Online.
The first two letters of the ServerName column are the datacenter code. In the example above:
- vi stands for Vienna, Austria
- he stands for Helsinki, Finland
- db stands for Dublin, Ireland
- am stands for Amsterdam, the Netherlands
Tip
As a standard policy, Microsoft does not disclose the precise location of its datacenters. You may need to tell the exact city based on the two-letter code in the ServerName column.
Related products: | CodeTwo Backup for Office 365, CodeTwo Email Signatures for Office 365 1.x, CodeTwo Office 365 Migration |
Categories: | How-To |
Last modified: | January 8, 2025 |
Created: | December 13, 2017 |
ID: | 669 |