We have some servers in a data center but the data center does not offer a DHCP service. We want to have some computers setup with DHCP and others that have static IP's.
Currently our WAN cable going directly into a switch and statically setting the IP's on our computers. Now my question is if I connect the WAN cable to a router then connect the router to the switch, will the router act as a bridge/switch and still allow the network traffic to the computers with static IP's (note: some of the computers might have static IP's in different subnets)?
Is a router the only option to achieve this? I have read that I could possibly setup a DHCP service on one of the computers but will the other computers be able to "see" it for DHCP?
Thanks for your help.
EDIT:
Our setup is pretty complex because we use a ton of virtual machines. Right now we are using VMWare Workstation 7 (on 4 different servers) and because our servers are in a data center we have the VM's connected to the VMWare NAT interfaces (over 80+ VMs and do not want to statically set each with an IP). But VMWare's NATing performance is very slow and causing some of the VM's to intermittently lose their network connections.
To add to the complexity our data center has issued us to sets of IP stacks, which unfortunately are on different subnets.
So we want to move away from using VMWares NATing and setup a DHCP server or router.
Each of the VM Host servers have 2 1GB NIC card. Currently each has a static IP and I wanted to route half of the VM's to one (eth0) and the other half to the other (eth1) using VMWare bridging.
If I setup a DHCP server on each host (because I do not want to route all DHCP traffic (40+ VMs) through 1 nic – potentially a lot of data being sent), can 1 NIC provide the DHCP while the other connect to the internet? And if thats the case will the Guest VM's be able to get an IP address from the Host's DHCP service?
Each host is running Ubuntu and I found this link:
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/dhcp3-server (multiple interfaces section)
Will that configuration work for our setup?
Sorry, I realize this if complex and I truly appreciate help/feedback.
Best Answer
Which router are you using? If your router supports IP Reservation (Statically declared list mapping IPs to MAC addresses) the this should be a cakewalk. Most of the Cisco routers support this (Even my WRT310 on DD-WRT has this).
So all you need to do is let your router use DHCP with a statically created list of of IP assignments for the machines you need static IPs for.