Hopefully, we don't need Chuck Norris today, do we?

Since NT4, I am rather sorry to say that I haven’t seen a lot of improvement to Windows’ DHCP Server service, Server 2008 is no exception to that near-zero evolution (support for NAP not taken into account of course).  When listening to customers, here are the top of feature request:

A decent high-availability solution: clustering is seen as too expensive or too complicated, split-scope are tedious to manage, in particular with a lot of reservations and “hot stand-by” server solution does not really belong to the high availability category. It’s high time to look at RFC3074 (DHC Load Balancing Algorithm) or to implement a feature similar to Exchange’s local continuous replication (LCR)

A support for granular/delegated administration: it would be nice to have a set of permission that would be applicable at server-level, super scope-level and scope level in order to improve manageability and ideally avoid the implementation of multiple DHCP Server when organization want to split the administration of computer addressing and IPTel addressing for example… And I don’t even talk about the frustration of helpdesk officers requesting read-only or very light “change” access to the console for changing reservations for example.

More granularity in Backup/Restore: once again, not only at server level but also scope and super scope

The ability to resize a scope without having to delete it, subnet-mask change included

A really usable “call-out” or “hook-in” API: The existing is complex to use (develop code) implement and maintain. It’d so much better to have a kind of event handler API, fully configurable from command-line and console) that can raise code as well as script execution (once again, remember the Exchange features has or had for this purpose)

A real reporting/statistics engine: For large environments, this would really help to see “what’s happening” on the short, mild and long term (trending)

An improved scripting/automation API: ok, it comes with a richer set NETSH of commands but guys, how do I explain to the customer that they have to forget about Powershell or VBScript? Have you ever used it? Don’t you honestly think it is almost as difficult to use as NTDSUTIL?

[From me]: a robust backend engine like SQL for example. This would not only increase stability I guess but also improve operations (backup/restore, if well structured, use SQL reporting services, make it cluster-aware…)

[From me]: based on that robust backend, equally robust and usable reporting capabilities. Yes I mean SQL Reporting Services

[From me]: a configurable and flexible way to log activity. Re-using the same philosophy as the one behind IIS W3C logging for example (frequency, field selection…) as well as better Windows Event loggin capability. It is funny to see that since Windows 2000, the DNS service got a dedicated log while DHCP is still lacking one

Note: most of the features requested here could be achieved by intensive scripting or custom code but then, where is the gain?

And Cut!