Christos Polydorou

With the end of main stream support coming up in a few months, I decided to start upgrading my lab environment to Windows Server 2016. I started with Active Directory and it's related services like DHCP. In this article we'll migrate the DHCP service from a machine running Windows Server 2012 R2 to one that's running 2016. The first step of the process would be to install and configure the DHCP server role on the new machine. I'm not going to describe the installation process since it's fairly simple, I will however show you the post installation configuration. The first screen is the description of the operation, followed by the authorization step: Here, we have to select the account that is going to be used in order to authorize the server: On the last step, the server is authorized and the groups used for delegating access are created: Now that our new DHCP server is ready, we have to migrate the configuration from the old one. The serv...

With Microsoft Windows Server 2003 End Of Live coming up in a few months, a growing number of companies start to examine the migration plans. Most times the DHCP in installed on the 2003 server and has to be migrated. In case you do not have a complicated DHCP configuration with many reservations or options it may be easier to just install the DHCP role on the new server and configure it from scratch. You should be very careful though when having both servers active because this will result in IP conflicts. To avoid conflicts I use exclusion ranges. I just exclude let's say half of the IPs from one server and the other half from the other. Even after that, there might be conflicts also because there might be clients that have already got an IP from the range that you excluded on the old server. Thus you should wait for a period of time longer than the lease time. If you want to migrate the entire DHCP configuration, there is a great article on Technet that describes the proces...