Use two DHCP servers in one LAN

How do I configure Windows XP to choose between one of as two DHCP servers in one (same) LAN?

Solution 1:

If you've got two (2) DHCP server computers in the same layer 2 broadcast domain, clients are going to be (mostly) randomly assigned addresses by either server computer. The one that answer's the client's DHCPDISCOVER reuqest first is going to end up assigning the address to the client.

I'm not sure this is a great idea. You're adding what is, essentially, a non-deterministic element to your network. If you want redundancy in DHCP, consider using a program to monitor the "health" of the primary DHCP server and, in the event of failure, bring up the secondary DHCP server.

Solution 2:

Please see the existing question that directly answers this issue

Split your DHCP scope among multiple servers?

These are not client side changes

Solution 3:

I am not aware of any way to specify a DHCP server from a network client. My question to you would be - why would you want to? In an AD, you can have multiple redundant DHCP servers, and you can configure them to manage the same scope without overlapping addresses. You can also configure reservations and several other things. If you need to have different DNS or WINS servers for some reason, the machines that require the exceptions can have manually configured DNS or WINS entries but still use DHCP.

Solution 4:

I don't think it is really recommended to have two DHCP servers on one lan...

If it is for redundancy one option is to use cluster services so that the dhcp files are stored and referenced by which ever server is running the dhcp service.

another solution would be to put you separate lans in vlans or similar so that only the client that are on that lan with each dhcp service will receive the correct dhcp request

hope that helps