How to migrate dhcp server superscope?

Question

I have super-scope dhcp server on Windows Server 2008 and I want migrate it to new Windows Server 2016 with all scopes, leases and reservations. Is there any way to do this? I know there is netsh dhcp server export command but I have read somewhere that this this only applies to normal scopes.

Answer 1

When we did this, a couple of years ago, we used netsh to do the bulk of the work.

Effectively, we ran netsh dhcp server 127.0.0.1 dump > backupfile.tmp, which wrote our config into backupfile.tmp. The contents of that file are readable -- essentially a list of subsequent netsh commands to configure the server. We used Notepad++ to do bit of manual pruning on that file (to match our new design), then loaded it back in using netsh exec backupfile.tmp. For us, it satisfied enough of the migration for the remainder to be trivial.

I can't verify your statement regarding only working on normal scopes but, the 2016 version of the netsh exec command can assign scopes to superscopes. If you have trouble, the fixup command is netsh dhcp server 127.0.0.1 scope 192.168.1.0 set superscope NameOfSuperscope (where 192.168.1.0 is the base address of your scope).

Fixups in Notepad++ might have to include:

• Bulk-replacing 127.0.0.1 with \\127.0.0.1 (or vice-versa)
• Saving the file in UTF8/ANSI encoding (rather than Unicode/UCS2)
• (there may be others -- feel free to comment, if you know of any)