Limit to the number of DHCP scopes I can have

dhcpdhcp-serverwindows-server-2012-r2

Some context:

Currently all devices in our remote sites are setup on 1 VLAN. We have 400 remote sites.

A project wants to split our sites into multiple VLAN's which on the whole seems like a good idea because they will be able to prevent PC's from talking to POS devices and so on.

In the current proposal, they have 5 VLAN's per site that will require DHCP.

We have 2 centralized DHCP servers for the entire environment which means I will go from having 400 scopes to 2000 scopes. Each scope is part of a Windows Server 2012 R2 DHCP Failover cluster so the numbers actually double in each case.

My questions are:

  1. Is there a limit to the number of DHCP Scopes I can deploy to a
    Windows Server 2012 R2 server? If there is, I'll need to consider adding more DHCP servers now.
  2. Is there another way to do my DHCP config so I can cut down on the number of scopes?
  3. Am I over thinking this considering we can now manage DHCP via PowerShell? We use PowerShell to manage the scopes already so we do have a level of automation we can apply.

Any advice or guidance will be appreciated. Please let me know if I need to clarify anything.

Thanks,

Chris

Best Answer

1 - Is there a limit to the number of DHCP Scopes I can deploy to a Windows Server 2012 R2 server? If there is, I'll need to consider adding more DHCP servers now.

According to this: http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/windowsserver/en-US/759becd0-9fbe-44e6-aac8-6f50036294c2/windows-2008-r2-x64-dhcp-server-maximum-scope-?forum=winserverNIS

There is no limit.

2 - Is there another way to do my DHCP config so I can cut down on the number of scopes?

This depends on your requirements. Do all sites have the same 5 VLAN's (Globally, 5 VLAN's), or are they separate each? (5x 400)? Do all sites need their own IP Space? How exactly are they connected? Depends on a lot of stuff.

3 - Am I over thinking this considering we can now manage DHCP via PowerShell? We use PowerShell to manage the scopes already so we do have a level of automation we can apply.

I'd definitely use PS in favor of Point on Click on this task :) And it should not be that complicated to do this using a script.

Related Topic