To Relay or Not to Relay - DHCP ? in a Hub and Spoke environment

[JamesTOA]

My question is, is there any risk or negative effects of setting up vlans on a spoke network with their own DHCP servers if their is DHCP server runing on the Hub network?

Is there a best practice recommendation to always setup spokes with DHCP relay or running there own DHCP servers for perspective vlans?

If you have the VPN setup between hub and spoke, is there any risk of competing DHCP servers if spoke networks vlans are set to run a DHCP server?

Thanks

[ww · Accepted solution]

That depends on your needs. I like to run it on the spoke, in case vpn is down your clients still get dhcp addresses.

There cant be competing dhcp servers in your mentioned options, because the communication its normally within a vlan. There would need to be more dhcp servers in that vlan, or you would use dhcp relay to more then one server

You could use a central dhcp if you have the requirement for central managed ipam, or you need the dhcp info for something like a siem

[JamesTOA]

So within the hub and spoke environment, if the Data vlan is set to run its own DHCP server, with its own vlan and ip range, even though there is a vpn aspect involved, their either isnt any DHCP requests being sent or received to the hub mx over that VPN unless you enable the relay, is that right?

We had some complaints about network connection at a remote site setup with its own network and its corp vlans had their own DHCP server settings, and one of our network admins thought it should be set to relay to avoid conflicts with Hub MX that points to two different MAIN campus DHCP servers. So i was wondering about any DHCP traffic that might being sent thru the vpn that we were previuosly unaware of.