Newbie question about networking and DHCP

[LeeTurley]

Hi,

Just starting out with ESXi5, I have a single HP MicroServer with a single NIC on a 192.168.1.x network directly connected to my home ADSL Router.  The Router is a DHCP server and I use it for laptops/smartphones in the house.  I have a virtual DC on my Microserver which I want to deal out the the DHCP addresses to all of the Virtual Machines.  In ESXi5 I have filled out the DNS & Routing details and put my DC as the first DNS Server and my Router as the secondary.  When I power on a new VM it picks the IP from my Router, I know because I have none overlapping IP Ranges.

Have I missed something out, or is it easier to set the ESXi5 Server to have a different IP Range eg 192.168.2.x ???

I am sure it is an easy solution.

Ta

[Sreejesh_D]

yes its possible, you can configure in a way all vms and host receives DHCP IP from DC.

For this you've to exclude the mac addresses of host and VMs from the DHCP server running in router. I am not sure the router you use support it or not.

[JimKnopf99]

one other option you have is to reglement your dhcp router only for the network 192.168.1.x and the VM DHCP for the Network 192.168.2.x

Frank

[scottyyyc]

You normally don't want to have 2 DHCP servers on one subnet. When a client requests an IP, it sends a broadcast packet out on the local subnet, so you only want 1 DHCP server on that local subnet. You can technically have more than 1, providing they each have unique scopes. But it will be totally random which one a client picks up.

Beyond that, you should be good to go. If you want your DC handling DHCP, just turn off DHCP on your home router.

[rickardnobel]

LeeTurley wrote:

In ESXi5 I have filled out the DNS & Routing details and put my DC as the first DNS Server and my Router as the secondary.

This is typically not how you want to setup DNS. The primary and secondary DNS servers of any DNS client should always give the same answers. In this case your DNS running on the domain controller will have a total other namespace which is not available on the router.

The best might be to configure the DC dns to forward to the router DNS, and only point the ESXi to the DC. This will give you both internet names and internal AD domain lookups.