Introduction
I’ve been hearing from a number of network admins who expect to be evaluating the benefits of upgrading their server operating system in the next year. Everyone wants to know whether the new features and functionalities are enough to make it worth the cost and hassle. That’s why I began this series on what’s new and cool in Windows Server 2012 networking. In part 1 of the series, we talked about new and improved features in 801.1x authenticated wired and wireless, BranchCache, Data Center Bridging (DCB), DNS and DHCP. In Part 2, we focused on a biggie: Hyper-V network virtualization.
As a quick refresher, here’s a list of some of the categories that offer new features for Windows Server 2012 networking, showing the ones we’ve already addressed in past articles, those we’ll look at in this article, and those still to come in future articles:
- 802.1x Authenticated Wired and Wireless Access
- BranchCache
- Data Center Bridging (DCB)
- Domain Name System (DNS)
- DHCP
- Hyper-V network virtualization
- IP Address Management (IPAM)
- Low Latency Workloads technologies
- Network Load Balancing
- Network Policy and Access Services
- NIC Teaming
- Windows QoS
- DirectAccess and Unified RRAS
- Windows Firewall with Advanced Security
This time we’ll delve into IPAM, a feature that’s brand new to Server 2012.
What is IP Address Management (IPAM)?
We’ve been managing IP addresses for a lot of years, but much of the time, it’s been done in a rather haphazard way. In too many cases, our IP addressing schemes “just grew that way.” It’s gotten more and more confusing as virtualization technologies and the enormous increase in the numbers and types of devices that connect to the network have complicated matters. Now, with IPv6 thrown into the mix, many network admins are finding themselves in over their heads. Keeping track of IP addresses manually has become a time-consuming and tedious task, prone to error. Thus IPAM tools such as Cisco’s Network Registrar and open source utilities such as MyIP and NetDB have been developed to address all that. There’s a plethora of IPAM solutions out there, many of which are sold as expensive hardware appliances.
Microsoft’s implementation of IPAM is a new server feature that’s built into Windows Server 2012, so there’s no need to buy or install additional software. This version of IPAM is robust and attempts to make IP management easier, but like all network management systems, it’s pretty complex itself. It consists of four main components, all aimed at helping you to more easily and accurately manage your corporate network’s IP address space and the servers (particularly DNS and DHCP) that deal most directly with IP addressing.
So what exactly does IPAM do? Broken down into its components, here are four broad categories of functionality:
- Automatically discovers and manages your domain controllers and DHCP and DNS servers.
- Displays IP addresses in the view you prefer and reports tracking and utilization information.
- Logs changes to server configuration and tracks usage of IP addresses by IP, client ID, host name or user name.
- Monitors your DHCP and DNS servers across an entire forest (but not across multiple forests).
IPAM supports both IPv4 and IPv6 addresses and of course is completely integrated with Microsoft’s implementations of DHCP and DNS (unlike some of the third party IPAM tools). Note that IPAM can only manage servers that are running Windows Server 2008 or above and are members of an Active Directory domain.
IPAM manages both static and dynamic addresses, and detects IP addressing conflicts and duplicate addresses as well as detecting and assigning available addresses.
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