Hi, I have setup a test windows server environment using virtual pcs. I have one domain controller (inc dhcp & dns) and one sccm server with several test clients. Currently my router is also a dhcp server, so for my test environment to work do I need to turn off dhcp on the router and e.g manual set ip address on my pcs as the router dhcp seems to always win. Sorry my networking skillls need a lot of work !

Should post this under networking. O.K. here goes. There are several schools of thought on this and I am sure you will hear from others here. My personal opinion is to not turn of DHCP all together but reset the scope of your DHCP addresses to allow a range of static IPs. Set your DHCP scope on your router to 200-254 which will give you 54 dynamic hosts that are managed by the router. On your Server (Assuming you are running Windows 2000,2003 or 2008 server) setup a Dynamic IP range from 100-199 which will give you 99 dynamic hosts that are managed by your server. This leaves you with 98 Static hosts for your servers and router. I suggest setting it up this way so that if your server goes down it will fall back to router.

Even given the setup ace suggests you would still need to turn dhcp off on the router. Otherwise you have workstations getting ips from either router. I would also point out that unless your lease time is really short the server and its dhcp group could go down but the workstations would still have their leased ips. If your test environment includes Active Directory and you want dhcp to dynamically update DNS you need the server being the only dhcp server.

thanks for the help guys