Ensuring DHCP Server Availability

  • Section(s): DHCP and DNS
  • Published on Mar 29, 2005.
  • Last Modified on Mar 29, 2005.
  • Last Modified by Mitch Tulloch.
  • Rated 2.3 out of 5 based on 4 votes.
Forget the 80/20 rule for DHCP server availability and use 50/50 instead.

The traditional 80/20 approach to DHCP server availaibility works well enough unless it takes longer than a few hours to get a failed DHCP server up and working again. Or unless you've configured leases shorter than three days because your network is a classroom, a conference facility, or has a lot of mobile users who connect to it remotely. Because of considerations like these, many network administrators prefer a more conservative 50/50 rule, which actually works even better in a single subnet environment anyway, provided both servers have enough addresses scoped to cover the needs of all the clients on the network. Then if one server goes down, the other one can take up the slack for as long as it takes to get the first one up and running again. The typical way of implementing this is to use exclusions, for example:

Server 1
Scope 10.0.0.1 to 10.0.0.250
Exclusion 10.0.0.126 to 10.0.0.250

Server 2
Scope 10.0.0.1 to 10.0.0.250
Exclusion 10.0.0.1 to 10.0.0.125

But you can also simply configure the scopes separately as:

Server 1 scope 10.0.0.1 to 10.0.0.125

Server 2 scope 10.0.0.126 to 10.0.0.250

Just don't let the scopes overlap when you configure them!

About Mitch Tulloch

Mitch Tulloch was lead author for the Windows Vista Resource Kit from Microsoft Press, which is the book for IT pros who want to deploy, maintain and support Windows Vista in mid- and large-sized network environments. Mitch was also the author of Introducing Windows Server 2008 and technical project lead for the Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 Resource Kit, both books also from Microsoft Press. For more information on these and other books by Mitch, see www.mtit.com .

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