DHCP failover

Never too much of a good thing? Just like the creation of multiple domain controller servers creates good redundancy for Active Directory, the DHCP servers in your network can be tied together into a failover pair to create their own form of high availability. While it is true that the DHCP server role often happens to co-exist alongside the AD DS and DNS roles, this is not a requirement. You already know that it is easy to store DNS zones right inside Active Directory so there is automatic replication of zone information, but this mentality is not true of DHCP scopes.

DHCP is a useful tool inside domain environments, or outside of domain environments. As such, it is not as tightly integrated a role as DNS. So when we create DHCP failover, we need to take a more manual approach, and whether or not the DHCP role happens to be hosted on top of a domain controller makes no difference.

Two DHCP servers

In a DHCP server failover environment, two DHCP servers can be configured...