Quick post to show you how DHCP reservations can be replicated between Windows servers. Why whould you want to do that? Because often, to achieve DHCP service high availability, DHCP scopes are equally divided between servers. When a client PC is connected to the network, it sends out a broadcast to discover which DHCP servers are active on that particular ethernet segment. Depending on their number, the PC will receive one or more answer, each offering an IP address. If a client is to be assigned a fixed IP, all of those offers should bear the same IP address. Hence, DHCP reservations need to be configured the same for every DHCP server in the given scope. As far as I know, this needs to be done by hand. To speed up the process, I use netsh (see Netsh commands for DHCP).

The command below will dump all of the reservations to a file named “reservations.txt”. findstr filters netsh output keeping just the info we need.

Each line in “reservations.txt” should look like this:

10.4.1.1 is the IP address for dhcpsrv1, the “source” DHCP server.

Open “reservations.txt” in a text editor, check that everything is fine and substitute the source DHCP server IP with the target’s one (i.e.: 10.4.1.1 becomes 10.4.1.2), save the file and run:

That’s it; not a fancy trick, but it may be useful nonetheless. Just beware that, when there are thousands of clients, netsh could take a while to complete its job (especially the “dump” step)…