In this demonstration,
let's have a look at IP Address Management in Windows Server.
I'm on a member server.
Recall, we cannot install IPAM on a domain controller.
And you're looking in the foreground here in my PowerShell console.
I'm just verifying that I've installed the IP Address
Management server and the Client.
So you should know that the Client feature is available in
the Remote Server Administration Tools,
so you can definitely use the IPAM Client from your workstation.
You don't have to be on the server itself.
The configuration for IPAM is going to take place here in Server Manager.
Let me start at the beginning here in the dashboard.
We'll come down to IPAM, and then that'll bring us to the OVERVIEW page.
Now I've already gone through the setup,
and we don't need to know too many details on setting it up for the exam,
but let me walk you through it from a high‑level viewpoint here.
Step one is where we connect to an IPAM server.
Of course, I have just the one.
And I think I mentioned that unfortunately IP Address Management in
Windows Server does not synchronize with other hosts.
It's just a singleton instance.
We then can provision the IPAM server either in an automated way
using Group Policy or we can do it manually.
If we look in the CONFIGURATION SUMMARY,
I've selected the Group Policy provisioning.
That makes things a lot easier as far as configuring firewall rules,
discovery, properties, etc.
And if I pop open my MMC console here, let me go into Group Policy Management,
you actually can do the automatic provisioning with a
PowerShell cmdlet that I'll mention in a moment.
But notice here that you provide a prefix,
and then you get three domain‑linked Group Policy Objects,
NPS to detect network policy servers, RADIUS servers,
DHCP, and DNS.
And you want to make sure that you include the appropriate servers in
the Security Filtering list for that as well because unfortunately
there's quite a few gotchas in setting up IPAM.
You'll want to check the Pluralsight library if you're looking for a deep dive.
Remember, we're concerned with certification preparation here,
so I'm going to be really surgical in my approach.
All right, so anyway, the GPO, once you deploy those,
let me bring up my PowerShell console one more time,
I'll do a help Invoke‑IpamGpoProvisioning,
and I'll just run the examples here.
And let me select this right here.
This is at base what I did, Invoke‑IpamGpoProvisioning.
You pass in the name of your AD domain, you provide a prefix, and there you go.
Again, it does quite a bit of work in the background to set up the environment,
doing access control lists, creating groups,
etc.
Again, you can do it manually if you want to.
After that, you configure server discovery.
This is basically selecting in your Active Directory forest
environment which domains you want to include and which
roles you're looking to monitor.
I'm doing domain controller, DHCP, and DNS in this case.
We then start server discovery, and this is just one of several scheduled tasks.
Down here in the CONFIGURATION SUMMARY we've got a number of scheduled tasks
that will be on the IPAM server scheduled task library,
and that is how the IPAM server is able to automate these various tasks
that run on a schedule or you can configure ad hoc.
It says here in the banner when the next data collection event will happen.
We're almost done here.
Select or add servers to manage.
This is going to show your enumerated servers.
There's server type.
You can right‑click to force a data refresh.
If you go to Edit, this allows you to adjust the server type manually.
In my environment, I have one machine, localdc,
that is a domain controller, DNS server,
and DHCP server.
Let me retrieve all server data on this one.
I've got a machine in a warning state that I want to take a look at as well.
And that's kind of problematic to get the IPAM access status to be unblocked.
Fortunately, we don't have to worry about that for our exam,
but you need that IPAM access status to be unblocked in order
for IPAM to probe and report on that machine.
Then we retrieve data from managed servers,
and clicking that link kicks off another scheduled task that does a data pull.
So we can see walking through the IPAM console here
we've got our SERVER INVENTORY, we have our IP ADDRESS SPACE,
starting with our IP Blocks, and you get a measure of utilization,
and you can look at utilization trends.
Mine is obviously very quiet, and it's quite new,
so there's really not much to see.
I have this 100 to 199 DHCP scope that I've set up.
When you right‑click this IPv4 address block,
we've got some pretty useful options here.
We can edit the range, we can create a reverse lookup zone,
import and update IP addresses, and what I like a lot,
find and allocate an available IP address.
How many times have you needed to do a reservation,
a DHCP client reservation for say a network printer?
And I don't know if you use ping,
however you try to figure out whether that IP is available in your network.
So this wizard, this Find and Allocate Available IP Address,
it is using ping actually and DNS record lookups,
but allows us to create a configuration,
as you can see here, including expiry and so on,
owner, serial numbers,
so you can do a lot of tracking on those IP addresses on how
they interact with your DNS and DHCP servers.
We can look at our IP Address Inventory.
Under MONITOR AND MANAGE,
this is where you can get into some basic server management.
So what I want you to see here is under DNS and DHCP Servers I've got the one,
dc1, that's doing both.
And we can look at the detailed view down below to look at policy and setup.
We can filter the view up here.
So this is useful if you have quite a few servers.
You can say just show me DHCP, just show me DNS.
When we right‑click, you can do some basic service configuration,
as you can see here, creating a scope, editing the server properties.
It's a different user interface from what you see in the
Microsoft Management Console as a matter of fact,
so you may like this interface more.
But lastly,
you'll find if you want to open the old school MMC for your DHCP or DNS,
you can right‑click and go to Launch MMC,
and that will kick up the good old‑school MMC console that
you might already be accustomed to using.
And that same thing goes with DNS.
We can look at zones, we can add resource records,
we can edit the zone,
and then as a convenience we have a filter in the Windows Event Log that
is showing us just IPAM‑related configuration events,
which is useful.
And then lastly, lastly,
we've got besides our IPAM and DHCP configuration events,
you can do IP address tracking.
So if you're looking for the lifecycle of a particular IP address
or by client ID or by hostname or by username,
you can do some reporting right from within the console.
So long story short, in summary,
it's nice that we have this IP Address Management
capability built into Windows Server.
You can't beat the price. It's free with your license.
On the other hand,
some pain points include that we don't have a centralized command and control
where we can share and synchronize IPAM databases on multiple servers, and I
also find that getting data out of here in the console is fairly problematic,
so you want to turn to PowerShell and administrative scripting to actually create CSVs and outputs of this data.