IP server address assignment for datacenter. Static or DHCP

[mario_kmc]

Hello all,

Hope this discussion is in the right place. I'm looking to get opinions and gather experiences.

Our company has around 10 branches with 2 datacenters. All users get IP address by DHCP but for static IP addresses of servers, printers etc we do static IP address on the device itself. Looking to make one of the datacenter's subnets (public IP address) smaller I now face the task of going into every server and changing mask and gateway (because the gateway was the last address of the subnet) manually on every server.

Is it best practice and recommended to have a DHCP server at least in every datacenter and make DHCP reservations instead of manually setting IP addresses?

What are your experiences on this issue?

Thanks

[Marwan ALshawi]

First of all servers normally host services that are accessed by clients or other servers and that's why you should not allocate ip addresses automatically to your servers

However if you want to simplify the public ip addressing of your dc you may keep using the private ip internally and nat on your Internet/dc edge to the desired public ip per server

Hope this helps

[mario_kmc]

Thanks for your tips marwanshawi,

But we try to stay away from NAT as much as possible.

[Marwan ALshawi]

well I am not sure how your DC and servers within your network being designed but if you have server to server and client to server type of communications and the servers obtain their IPs dynamically how this communications can be stable !!

not to mention if you have name to IP in your network/DNS which make static IP allocation very improtant thing to consider

servers engineers might use a script to automate re assigning IPs to the servers and no need to manually change them one by one

hope this help

[mario_kmc]

Hi marwanshawi,

I believe you understood me wrong. Please re-read my initial post especially the last part "... and make DHCP reservations instead of manually assigning IP addresses".

DHCP reservations allow to make a mapping of IP <-> MAC so that even if a client/DHCP reboots it will always get the same IP address as configured in the reservation configuration. I have seen this also being called "static DHCP"

My objective with this post is to discuss and gather ideas and experience on manual static configurations on server NICs vs. DHCP reservations (not simple and free DHCP).

Mario