I have inherrited an 2003 Active Directory network that was setup by someone else. At headquarters we have the Primary DC and the Secondary DC. Both are also the DHCP, DNS and WINS servers for this office. For some reason the previos Sys Admin setup the DHCP scope on the Primary AD server as 192.168.10.110 - 192.168.10.179 and the Secondary AD server as 192.168.10.180 - 192.168.10.250. I am thinking that he did this for failover but my questions is, is this actually neccessary or can you set up a similar environment where the AD PDC and BDC are redundant of each other for DHCP the same way they are for our AD, DNS and WINS on each server at this one office? Please let me know if you have any questions.
thank you
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This is known as a "split-scope" Your admin did a 50/50 split. What is more common 80/20 or 70/30(google DHCP 80/20)
It is done for the reason you said, redundancy. DHCP doesn't replicate like AD or DNS so that is why this design is used.
You can find more info here:
http://blogs.technet.
How to use Split-Scopes in DHCP for a Robust Deployment
In windows 2008 they actually have a split scope wizard
http://blogs.technet
O
Thanks
MIke
Definitely for the reason of redundancy, not quite for failover. Both DHCP server are running and both scope are activated, I believe. You can double check on the display statics from the DHCP manager.
This will allow users to obtain IP address from any one of them. The % split doesn't matter in this case assuming both servers are in the same subnet. If one scope is for a remote office, then 70% local and 30% remote would be appropriate.
if there aren't any other know issue you are experiencing, I would leave it as is. It's not a bad design and a very simple way to manage DHCP.
I recommend that my answer also be accepted.
It sounds like he is talking about service clustering instead of split scope configuration. Although this may be much more complicated and split scope is the recommended way.
So as my comment stated to answer his original question "can you set up a similar environment where the AD PDC and BDC are redundant of each other for DHCP the same way they are for our AD, DNS and WINS on each server at this one office?"
Yes, "This is possible with a DHCP cluster but you must have the enterprise version of the OS."
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by: OriNetworksPosted on 2009-02-01 at 16:35:46ID: 23523747
This is possible with a DHCP cluster but you must have the enterprise version of the OS.