Dynamically assigning IP addresses to clients makes IP address management easier, but your clients may not always want to refer to other computers by IP address. If you are running the Windows Internet Naming Service (WINS) in your environment, client computers automatically register their names with that service, which allows users to use the NetBIOS protocol to resolve computer names. If you prefer to rely on the Domain Name System (DNS), clients will need to dynamically register their hostname via dynamic DNS updates. You could allow each client to register their own A and PTR records, but then each client would send its own set of DNS updates to your DNS servers. If you have hundreds of clients, that would be hundreds of computers that send dynamic updates. There are also some security issues with allowing clients to do this. Another option is to use the DHCP Server to send dynamic updates on behalf of clients.

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When a DHCP Server responds to a client request for a lease, the server also responds with any configured options for the scope. Options are nothing more than bits of configuration information, such as the servers to use for name resolution, the default domain name, default router, etc. Some options may be specific to a particular scope (for example, the default router for a subnet) or may be more global (such as the default domain name). The former are called scope options and the latter are called server options.

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Once you create a scope, you have to activate it before clients can obtain leases from it. But before you activate a scope, be sure to configure any necessary scope options. If you activate a scope before configuring options, clients may obtain leases, but still not be able to communicate on the network if settings such as the default router are not set.

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Superscopes allow you to manage a collection of scopes as one entity. You can activate or deactivate all the scopes in a superscope at one time and view the combined lease statistics for all scopes in the superscope.

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A scope is group of settings that define how the DHCP Server is supposed to handle requests for a given network.

Before creating scopes, decide how you are going to manage them. Develop a naming convention for the scopes that make them easy to identify their networks. Use good descriptions. You may want to add contact information to the description of a specific scope if there are certain people you need to contact when problems arise on that network (e.g., running out of leases). Use contiguous IP address space as much as possible and avoid using excluded IP ranges to keep a straightforward scope layout.

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