I have 4 locations operating to our Head Office at another location. It is in the same country. All 4 locations are accessing our HQ Servers for Mail and Application servers and has static IPs. Also the printing is taking place at 4 locations which is generated from the HQ locaation servers. All locations have also servers locally for their storage. The main applications are in HQ which is directly accessed by 4 locations and invoicing and other functions are done. I have felt secure and fine having static IP at all 4 locations and it also has been consuming less bandwidth etc. everything is working fine. stability is also fine. but some business vendors are telling that dhcp is fine and also it is good to change into dhcp. kindly tell me the best advantages and best about having static ip than changing over to dhcp ?

DHCP can not only assign an IP number, but can also specify a default gateway and WINS servers for each client. If your network is small, you probably won't mind having static IPs, because if you ever need to do a change, you will need to touch just a few computers. But if you have a large network, you'll find that making your machines to get IP numbers via DHCP will ease your task in the long run as you'll need to take care only of your DHCP server. Hope this helped you enough :) Andrés

You can read Advantages of DHCP Reservation over Static IP Assignment. Microsoft Knowledge Base Article - 170062 http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;EN-US;Q170062 While functionality wise they are not any different. One of many aspects that makes DHCP apealing is automated Network Scope property assignemts, reservations and exclulsions. The Pros and Cons are just like any other. If your network is small (Say less than 5 PCs) you may NOT benifit from DHCP. But if users are Mobile from one Network to Another (differnet IPS, DHCP is awesom) or remote and local. It just depends on your requirements and demands. Overall - generally it reduces administration of IP management.

Two cents worth. Microsoft likes to overrate DHCP. They have bound it into dynamic DNS so for large networks it works really well. As far as pro and cons; you can use both. Static range for set stations and certain ip range. You can use dhcp for a different dialin-remote scope. Good thing about static is you can spreadsheet id every station and know where every mac address is located. I think you have better security and can detect intrusions better this way. It is manageable on a small scale but unmanagable in a larger scale[over 50-100 not 5 wksts]. Dhcp doesn't really put that much traffic on the wire compared to MS's constant authenication requirements when accessing resources. It really comes down to what works best for you. If you are growing then consider converting to dhcp before it becomes a monumental task to convert from static to dhcp. Minimal growth stay the way you are.