Purpose

In this lab, we used Cisco Packet Tracer to configure a DHCP server that will assign IP information to laptops and workstations in a network.

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Configuring the DHCP Server

To start, we enabled and configured DHCP on the distribution-layer server (Services > DHCP > Service On). Then we changed the last octet of the Start IP Address to 100.

Pools for each VLAN from Lab 2-1 were created and added to the DHCP server. Each pool was given a name that corresponded to the VLAN interfaces, the default gateway that matched each VLAN's router address, a start IP address that reflected each VLAN's IP address but with a different ending octet (.20 and .100 octets were used for this lab), the subnet mask that matched each VLAN, and the maximum number of users associated with each VLAN given the subnet mask. Two of the remaining fields (DNS and TFTP) were left at 0.0.0.0 and not given any values. An example of one of these pools and the complete pool for the VLANs are shown below.

Then, we added a workstation and connected it to FastEthernet0/4 of East-Core-Switch-01 and made sure this port was an access port on VLAN 1. The workstation should be able to request and receive an IP address from the DHCP server by going to Desktop > IP Configuration > DHCP in the workstation's settings. Similarly, you can run the command ipconfig /renew from the workstation's command line to perform the same action.

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Configuring DHCP Relay

In order to get DHCP broadcasts from the VLANs (100, 110, 130, 140), we needed to tell the router (or East-Core-Switch-01) to forward them to the DHCP server.

On the switch CLI, go into the interface configuration for each VLAN and enter the command ip helper-address <IP address of DHCP server>

In this case, the IP address of the DHCP server was 10.17.10.2.

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Configuring The Clients to Use DHCP

Lastly, we entered the configuration settings for each workstation and changed their gateway from static to DHCP. If done successfully, the matching default gateway and a specific IP address should be assigned to each workstation accordingly. The screenshots below show the DHCP configurations for the FacStaff-01, Student-05, Lab1-02, and Lab2-01 workstations.

Proper connectivity was further verified by pinging some devices on the network.