Why do we need dedicated DHCP servers?

So I'm just curious what practical use does a dedicated DHCP server hold over a hardware router in a corporate environment? I know back in the bad old days it was needed but hardware has come down. Whats so hard about purchasing a router and then daisy chaining the switches?

Thanks

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Comments

tiersten

If you want integration into DNS or something like AD then you'd want it on a server.

DHCP is a software process on a router so you're making it dedicate time to handling that instead of actually routing.

The router DHCP implementation generally doesn't give you all the options that a DHCP server on a real machine will have.

It doesn't particularly matter if you're not running a high performance or large network but if you do then you won't want to do this. This also applies to you "purchasing a router and then daisy chaining the switches". That'll work for a small network but you're going to end up with horrendous issues with if you do that on anything but a small basic network. Its a fallacy of IT staff thinking networking is easy :P

it_consultant

Nobody I know has a dedicated DHCP server. Normally DHCP runs along with Active Directory and DNS on a domain controller. Even then the server is normally not breathing hard, which is why virtualization is so grand.

Daisy chaining...what happens when the top switch goes out?

Hyper-Me

In a small-medium environment its not intensive enough to actually need to be on its own sever, so it can live with some other services.

My last job was a large environment (12,000+ devices) so we used a virtual machine on a failover cluster to provide DHCP services. Nothing else was installed on that VM. It performed very well.

ssampier

it_consultant wrote: »

Nobody I know has a dedicated DHCP server. Normally DHCP runs along with Active Directory and DNS on a domain controller. Even then the server is normally not breathing hard, which is why virtualization is so grand.

Daisy chaining...what happens when the top switch goes out?

Interesting. I have been a fan of running corporate DHCP on nas-file-print servers myself. If the file/print servers are really taxed, then I would run DHCP on a workstation class machine.

Each company definitely has their own way of doing things.

DevilWAH

I think managment is the other thing? You suggest running DHC on the router??

easy when you only have two or three scopes, but my DHCP server has 40+ scopes at the last count, managing this on a router would be hideous.

Then integrating DHCP and DNS with AD would add another factor on top. Im with the guys suggesting DNS and DHCP on the same box, and if you have AD add to a Domain controler.

But if you watch out DHCP sever (which is stand alone) at 8-9am it has a spike as every pc gets turned on, as dose the domain controlers.

The best solution is a VM machine as as people log on teh DHCP servers can utilise the resorces, and then once that calms down and people ae using other services such s email the resources can go over to that.