Skip to main content

DHCP Management

Subnetly runs DHCP through your agents — ISC Kea on Linux, or the native DHCP Server role on Windows. You define scopes, reservations, and options in the console and assign each scope to an agent or a high-availability pair.

Open DHCP from Network Operations → DHCP in the left navigation. The page shows totals (scopes, reservations, overall pool utilization, enabled scopes) and a live indicator while agents report lease activity.

In this section

  • Scopes — create a DHCP service for a subnet: CIDR, lease range, enable/disable, and deployment assignment.
  • Reservations — pin a specific IP to a specific MAC, with optional hostname, client-id, and PXE boot settings.
  • Options — the DHCP options sent to clients (gateway, DNS, domain, NTP, PXE, and more).
  • Leases — view live leases reported by the agent and promote a lease to a reservation.
  • HA groups — Kea failover pairs so DHCP keeps serving if one agent goes down.

How DHCP serving works

  1. You create a scope for a subnet and set its lease range and options.
  2. You assign the scope to a single agent, or to an HA group (a Kea failover pair).
  3. Subnetly renders the Kea (or Windows) configuration and pushes it to those agents.
  4. Agents report leases back, which you can view live and convert to reservations.

Quick tasks

I want to…Go to
Create a DHCP scopeCreate a scope
Reserve an IP for a deviceAdd a reservation
Set the gateway/DNS handed to clientsOptions
See who currently has a leaseLeases
Make DHCP highly availableHA groups
Find a device across all scopesDHCP search