Overview of DHCP

As you saw in Chapter 12, TCP/IP is the priority protocol for Windows Server 2008 R2. There are two ways to have clients and servers get TCP/IP addresses:

• You can manually assign the addresses.
• The addresses can be assigned automatically.

Manually assigning addresses is a fairly simple process. An administrator goes to each of the machines on the network and assigns TCP/IP addresses. The problem with this method arises when the network becomes midsize or larger. Think of an administrator trying to individually assign 4,000 TCP/IP addresses, subnet masks, default gateways, and all other configuration options needed to run the network.

DHCP’s job is to centralize the process of IP address and option assignment. You can configure a DHCP server with a range of addresses (called a pool) and other configuration information and let it assign all the IP parameters—addresses, default gateways, DNS server addresses, and so on.