One of the great new features that Windows brings 2012 Server is the possibility of having the DHCP service in high availability (Finally!), since it is one of the most critical services of organizations. We can create a load balancing between two DHCP servers or mark one server as active and another passive, the latter waiting for the fall of the asset to provide service.

So far, setting up a service that provides fault tolerance with Microsoft's DHCP was somewhat more costly or we directly had to turn to other solutions. With Windows Server 2012 we will be able to create a cluster easily, for this, we will already have the DHCP service running on a server, with scopes, etc… On a second server, we will also install the DHCP role. On each scope or on the IPv4 properties > “Configure failover…”

We select the scope for which we want to provide such high availability (or all of them) & “Following”,

Click on “Add Server” to select the server associated with these scopes,

We select the authorized DHCP server that we want,

And we select the type of relationship between both servers, we can set up load balancing by providing more or less % load on the local DHCP server or its associate, as well as whether we want an Active-Passive relationship. We will also indicate the maximum lead of the clients or if we want to reverse our DHCP configuration to X minutes.

We confirm that the configuration is correct & “End”,

… we wait while it is being configured…

And that's it, we can deconfigure if we are interested in certain areas, as well as force replication between the servers…