Every workstation (actually, every device with a network interface card) on an IP network requires a unique IP address and a corresponding subnet mask. You can statically configure each device with an IP address or you can implement dynamic IP addressing through DHCP. The solution you choose will depend a lot on the network environment.

To illustrate one of the difficulties of using manually assign IP addresses, think of a large enterprise network that hosts thousands of users. It is possible to visit each workstation and manually configure IP addresses however; this would be extremely inefficient and time consuming. To top it all off, the work would not stop there. Any changes that must be made to IP parameters, such as the addition of a DNS server, will again require you to visit a number of workstations, if not all of them, to reconfigure the parameters. A more appropriate solution for networks that have a large number of workstations is to implement dynamic IP address assignment through DHCP.

To automate the process of assigning IP addresses to network clients, the DHCP Server service must be installed on at least one server. The steps required to install DHCP on Windows Server 2008 are outlined below.

1. Open the command prompt and type: start /w ocsetup DHCPServerCore.
2. Configure a DHCP scope at the command prompt by using netsh, or by remotely using the DHCP snap-in from Windows Server 2008.
3. If the DHCP server is installed in an Active Directory domain, you must authorize it in Active Directory.
4. Since the DHCP service does not start automatically, you need to manually start it. Use the following procedure to configure it to start automatically and to start the service for the first time.
5. At the command prompt type: sc config dhcpserver start= auto. This configures the service to start automatically.
6. To start the service, type: net start dhcpserver.

[tags]windows server 2008, windows server[/tags]