How to configure DHCP Server on Cisco IOS

Cisco IOS routers and layer 3 switches can be configured as DHCP server. It’s quite easy to do this and in this short lesson I want to explain to you how to do this and how to verify your configuration. If you are a little fuzzy how DHCP works, take a look at my introduction to DHCP first.

Let’s use the following topology:

Above we have a router that I will call ‘DHCP’. The router and computer are connected to each other using a simple switch and in the same VLAN. We will use the 192.168.12.0 /24 subnet for this demonstration. Let’s prepare the interface first:

DHCP(config)#interface fastEthernet 0/0
DHCP(config-if)#no shutdown
DHCP(config-if)#ip address 192.168.12.1 255.255.255.0

Now let’s configure DHCP server:

DHCP(config)#ip dhcp pool MYPOOL
DHCP(dhcp-config)#network 192.168.12.0 255.255.255.0

Use the ip dhcp pool command to create a DHCP pool and give it a name. This DHCP pool will use network 192.168.12.0 /24. Basically this is all you have to do to get DHCP server going, there is no need to start a service or something. We can verify that we have DHCP clients using the following command:

DHCP#show ip dhcp binding 
Bindings from all pools not associated with VRF:
IP address          Client-ID/	 	    Lease expiration        Type
		    Hardware address/
		    User name
192.168.12.2      0063.6973.636f.2d63.    Mar 02 2002 12:24 AM    Automatic
                    6330.372e.3132.3265.
                    2e30.3030.302d.4661.
                    302f.30

Above you can see that we have a DHCP client and it received IP address 192.168.12.2. In production networks we will also use DHCP to hand out some other useful things like a default gateway, DNS server and more. Let’s see how we can do this:

DHCP(config)#ip dhcp pool MYPOOL               
DHCP(dhcp-config)#default-router 192.168.12.1
DHCP(dhcp-config)#dns-server 208.67.222.222

Above I configured IP address 192.168.12.1 as the default gateway for the DHCP clients with the default-router command. The dns-server commands lets us specify a DNS server.

Something else you might want to do is exclude a number of IP addresses. With the configuration so far our DHCP server will hand out IP address .2,3,4,5,6 etc. Here’s how to do it: