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Background

My company has recently instituted a corporate policy that all servers are to have IP addresses that are issued via DHCP reservations to simplify the management of our IP scopes. We have a Windows 2008 R2 Failover Cluster that is comprised of two servers to host our ERP system. I have changed the physical NICs on these servers to pull from DCHP reservations.

Issue

In the properties screen of the IP Address resource for my clustered service, which happens to be SQL, I can change the "IP Address" setting from Static IP Address to DHCP Enabled; however, there is no option to configure a MAC address.

Question

How do I configure an IP Address resource to take on specific MAC address so that a DHCP reservation can be created? If this cannot be accomplished, then is there another way to get a DHCP reservation in place?

Considerations

A new scope can be created for those devices/services that do not support retrieving their IP from DHCP, but this will likely not be available for a couple of months.

Matthew Ball
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    "instituted a corporate policy that all servers are to have IP addresses that are issued via DHCP" - For $DEITY sake, why?! If DHCP goes down, so do all your servers. Not to mention the potential problems of misconfigured DHCP, rogue DHCPd servers, or other problems I can't think of right now. – Chris S Jun 15 '11 at 17:24
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    Sure a lot riding on DHCP working properly. – Dave M Jun 15 '11 at 17:27
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    Change that policy - there's no good reason to run servers via DHCP - for exactly the reasons ChrisS gave and more - basically it's really a single point of failure and NOBODY with any experience would think of doing it if they cared for their infrastructure {cue lots of people with a few years experience defending their stupid idea} – Chopper3 Jun 15 '11 at 17:33
  • @chris s If dhcp goes down your servers do not go down. (unless your lease time is some ridiculously short time period). IMO the biggest issue is the maintainability nightmare this creates. – Jim B Jun 15 '11 at 17:36
  • @Jim B, If the DHCP server flakes, there's a good chance nobody will notice until the lease start expiring... Or if the power goes out and your DHCP server(s) don't come up for whatever reason... – Chris S Jun 15 '11 at 17:39
  • @chris s I would think that if you are able to have a server go down in your environment without anyone getting notified, using DHCP on your server is the least of your problems. I was just being a little nitpicky as the major flaws in this idea overshadow the minute details of why this is a bad idea – Jim B Jun 15 '11 at 18:14
  • Whoever instituted this policy knows nothing about IT. – KCotreau Jun 15 '11 at 22:32

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