A systems administrator is investigating reports of intermittent network connectivity for several newly deployed virtual machines (VMs). The administrator discovers that these new VMs are receiving duplicate IP addresses, which are also assigned to other devices on the same subnet. Existing devices that have had their IP addresses for a long time are not experiencing this issue. The administrator suspects a misconfiguration on the DHCP server. Which of the following is the MOST likely cause of this problem?
The default gateway option is missing from the DHCP scope.
The DHCP server's conflict detection setting is disabled.
The DHCP server has not been authorized in Active Directory.
The lease duration for the DHCP scope is set too long.
The correct answer is that the DHCP server's conflict detection setting is disabled. By default, some DHCP server implementations, including Windows Server, have this feature turned off to speed up the lease process. When conflict detection is disabled, the DHCP server does not check if an IP address is already in use (e.g., by a statically assigned device) before offering it to a client. Enabling conflict detection, typically by setting it to perform at least one ICMP ping test, prevents the server from leasing an address that is already active on the network, thus avoiding duplicate IP address conflicts.
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What is DHCP conflict detection?
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How can duplicate IP addresses affect network connectivity?
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Why is conflict detection disabled by default on some DHCP servers?