The DHCP scope determines the address configurations used on a subnet. In this video, you’ll learn how scopes are administered on a DHCP server.
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In an earlier video we were talking about the DHCP process and how the DHCP server contains a pool of IP addresses. This pool of IP addresses is configured as a scope. And generally you would have one DHCP server that’s able to handle IP addresses that are configured on many different subnets simultaneously. And so you would create multiple scopes within your DHCP server that provided that particular automation for you.
The scope is generally a single pool of addresses. It’s a contiguous pool, so it’s from one to a certain number and everything in between. And if you need to make any exceptions to the DHCP scope, you can do that right in the DHCP server.
When you’re configuring the scope in your DHCP server, you’re generally giving an IP address range of course. You’re defining the subnet mask that will be used on that particular subnet. You’ll also be defining the lease duration. This is how long you get to keep the IP address. We’ll be going over DHCP leases in detail in the next video.
And there’s other scope options you can configure as well. You can define DNS servers that will be used by the workstations, the default gateway, WINS servers. There’s Voice over IP information you can add. Anything that deals with IP configurations you will configure as part of that DHCP scope.
This is the DHCP configuration inside of my Windows server. You can see I’m in a windows server manager on Network SG-1. And you can see under the DHCP server, under IPv4, I have a single scope configured of 165.245.44.0.
And this is one where I can configure the address pool, the address leases, the reservations, and the scope options. This gives me one place to go so that I can configure all of the different scopes for every subnet on my network. This makes it very easy for me to configure, and in that way makes it very easy for my users to automatically get an IP address.