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TechBird

Hardware requirements for DHCP servers are minimal, and servers that meet the minimum Windows Server 2008 hardware requirements can act as DHCP servers for thousands of client computers. Additionally, you can combine DHCP with DNS, WINS, or other infrastructure services. Although your DHCP servers might never experience a performance bottleneck, at extreme periods of activity (such as when thousands of computers restart after a power failure), disk I/O can be the limiting factor in performance. To optimize disk I/O, use Redundant Array of Independent Disks (RAID) configurations or another high-performance storage technology.

DHCP server storage requirements are minimal. Although the DHCP database is capable of growing to several gigabytes, typical database sizes are less than 100 MB.

For redundancy, you should plan to provide at least two DHCP servers. If a DHCP server is not available when a DHCP client starts, the client typically assigns itself an Automatic Private IP Addressing (APIPA) address that can access only other hosts with APIPA addresses. The result is that, when a DHCP server is not available, DHCP clients will not be able to access any network resources.