DHCP server hardware requirements

Question

Iron

There is a task to pick up the HW-configuration of the server under DHCP. This is not about a small / medium office, but a larger scale. What nuances should be considered when choosing the optimal hardware?

Thank you.

Answer 1

for a dhcp server under linux/bsd for tens of thousands of clients, a simple atom with 256RAM is enough.
The problem lies elsewhere: DHCP is not routable. In one broadcast-domain, even hundreds of clients is nonsense (your broadcast traffic will eat up a serious percentage of network bandwidth. DHCP forwarding (there are several ways) will have problems. If we continue the chain, we will invariably come to the conclusion that:
1) All clients in one broadcast-domain: there is a brake network with an atom for DHCP, everything works, but very slowly.
2) There is a network divided into several broadcast-domains:
2.a) (cheap option) routing between broadcast-domain (networks) is handled by the PC. Then it is effective to pile up DHCP on it. Here the main requirement is a good network card with offload.
2.b) (not expensive) network core is made on 3rd level switches with DHCP Relay. The same atom is perfect. The requirements are more for the network card than for memory. Yes, and many switches can not only be a relay, but also a server.
2.c) (Expensive) There is an iron router in the core. The most expensive, most stable, etc. And dhcp server is not needed in principle.
PS I recommend to use freebsd for DHCP server. (minimum requirements for hardware with the same quality characteristics).
PPS Will you accurately design a network for 100+ clients? (the question is that networks for 10 clients and for 100+ are built according to different principles)

Answer 2

How many clients are we talking about, what OS do you plan to use?

Answer 3

Far more than once I met when dhcp was distributed either by some thread of a cisco, or by virtual machines like linux / windows server with a gigabyte of memory, one core, and in the case of winserver - core mode. If there are unrealistically many clients, then the memory can be increased if the database hangs in memory.

Answer 4

If there are really a lot of clients planned, then you need to think not about one server, but about a scalable architecture of many servers.
Both for performance and fault tolerance.
Individual servers, however, can be modest.
In general, if there is no dhcp flood in the network, the performance dhcp server is not required.

Answer 5

The DHCP server team blog has posts about sizing and performance measurements:
blogs.technet.com/b/teamdhcp/archive/2012/12/16/sizing-guidance-for-windows-server-2012-dhcp-server.aspx
blogs. technet.com/b/teamdhcp/archive/2009/06/29/dhcp-server-performance-in-windows-server-2008-r2.aspx