I Want Windows Server 2012 to Always Assign Same IP Address to File Server

[viveknayyar007]

You are talking about DHCP reservation. When you want a particular client computer to always receive the same IP address from the DHCP server, you reserve the desired IP address in the DHCP reservation.

In order to reserve a particular IP address for a specific DHCP client computer, you must know the MAC address of the target client computer. Once the MAC address is known, you must then map the IP address with the MAC address. This way, whenever the DHCP server receives an IP address request from the mapped MAC address, it automatically assigns the reserved IP address to the requesting DHCP client computer.

The benefit of configuring the DHCP reservations is that even if you don’t want to manually assign the static IP addresses to the mission-critical computers, you can still make the DHCP server assign the dynamic IP addresses to those computers, where each mission-critical computer would receive the mapped dynamic IP address from the DHCP server every time the address is requested. This allows the administrators and other users of the network to locate the mission-critical computers with their IP addresses (which are always the same), even if the IP addresses have been assigned to the computers by the DHCP server.

Here is how you can reserve an IP address for a particular DHCP client computer:

■Log on to the Windows Server 2012 DHCP server using the default Administrator account or the Domain Admin account (in case of client/server architecture).

■If not started automatically, initialize the Server Manager window by clicking its corresponding icon present at the bottom left corner of the screen in the taskbar.

■On the opened Server Manager window, from the left pane, click to select the DHCP category.

■From the right pane, under the SERVERS section, right-click the DHCP server displayed in the list.

■From the context menu, go to DHCP Manager.





■On the opened DHCP snap-in, from the left pane, expand the server name, and then expand the IPv4 tree.

■From the expanded list, expand the target scope that has the IP address for which you want to create the reservation. (Subnet01Scope for this demonstration.).

■From the displayed list, click to select the Reservations container.

■After selecting, right-click the Reservations container, and from the displayed context menu, go to New Reservation.





■On the opened New Reservation box, populate the Reservation name, IP address, MAC address, and Description fields with the appropriate values.

Note: IP address would be the address that you want the DHCP server to always assign to the DHCP client computer. MAC address will be the physical address of the DHCP client computer to which the reserved IP address would be assigned.





■Finally click the Add button to create the new DHCP reservation.