The Infoblox DHCP module provides high-performance, feature-rich DHCP services that use an enhanced version of the industry-standard ISC DHCP protocol engine and is tightly integrated with Infoblox bloxSDB database technology. Infoblox enhancements enable DHCP “server restarts” to occur in seconds, and avoid restarts completely for operations such as MAC filter updates, minimizing service outages. In addition, the Infoblox implementation of DHCP failover addresses known limitations in the standard approach and has been proven to provide reliable failover operation and avoid the lockups and errors frequently exhibited by standard DHCP implementations.

Reliable DHCP Service: DHCP is a core network service that is widely used to automatically provision IP addresses for PCs and servers and is increasingly essential with the rapid proliferation of new classes of networking devices, such as IP phones, RFID readers, cameras, and others. Infoblox provides multiple approaches to ensuring availability for this critical service. Infoblox bloxHA and bloxSYNC technologies enable sub 5-second failover between appliances deployed in high-availability pairs and also ensure perfect synchronization between active and failover appliances to prevent the issuance of duplicate IP addresses. Infoblox also supports the DHCP failover protocol, allowing high-availability relationships between appliances on different networks. With DHCP failover, a central DHCP server can backup multiple remote DHCP servers, saving on the cost of providing reliability.

Historical Reporting of DHCP lease Information: The Infoblox DHCP service stores all of the historical information about DHCP leases in the built-in bloxSDB database for future retrieval. This not only helps network administrators quickly troubleshoot problems with DHCP but also is extremely valuable for tracking security problems and meeting compliance requirements.

Split/Join Networks: As companies expand and grow, either organically or through acquisition, they need to be flexible with their DHCP networking configuration. Split/Join networks allows a company to easily adjust to the dynamic nature of today’s networks. Split networks allow an administrator to quickly, easily, and accurately subdivide a network and have the resulting sub-networks inherit the configuration of the parent network. Join/Expand networks is unique in that it allows the administrator to “grow” a series of smaller networks into a bigger network without losing any of the configuration, including fixed addresses, dynamic ranges, and DHCP other options.

Single Graphical Application to Manage DHCP Data & Services: The administration of DHCP and IP address data and DHCP servers running on Infoblox appliances can be securely delegated to administrators based on appliance and subnet. The management of DHCP and IP address data and DHCP services using the graphical Infoblox Grid Manager application is fast, easy, and powerful.

Advanced DHCP Options Editor: Setting DHCP options is critical for many applications including user configuration, VoIP, and wireless access point management. Configuring DHCP options can be complicated. NIOS includes a GUI-driven options editor that simplifies both standard and custom DHCP options configuration.
The DHCP module is available in the software packages illustrated in the following chart:

	DHCP Technical Specifications
	RFCs supported RFCs 3046, 2131 and 1531 BOOTP, RFCs 1534 and 2132 Protocol engine DHCPD 3.0.1 Additional Capabilities • VLSM (Variable Length Subnet Mask) support • CIDR (Classless Inter-Domain Routing) support • Multiple subnets per segment (supernetting) • "Static leases" based on MAC address (manual allocation) • MAC-address-based filtering • Address availability checking before assignment • DHCP relay agent/Option 82 support • Secure DHCP-DNS integration updates DNS when leases are issued • Advanced DHCP Options Editor • Windows, Unix, and Mac OS compatibility • External syslog server support