Configuring DHCP server failover

Prior to Server 2012, there were limited methods of ensuring DHCP was redundant and always available to service requests. One of the most common methods was to split DHCP scopes between multiple servers, with each server providing a subset of the scope. If one system was unavailable, the other system was still able to provide a subset of addresses. However, this caused problems because if a DHCP server was unavailable, there may not be enough addresses available to service all of your clients. Other redundancy options involved clustering or other expensive technologies that were difficult to manage.

In Server 2012 DHCP server failover is a built-in feature. This feature allows servers to share a common DHCP database to provide leases and provide redundancy. To use DHCP failover, the DHCP feature just needs to be installed and configured across servers. This recipe will walk through the configuration of DHCP failover.

Getting ready

This recipe assumes a server...