Hello Everyone,

I know this has been discussed before but I am still puzzled.

My understanding is that if the DHCP server is unavailable the XP client will attempt to ping the default gateway. If this is successful it will continue to use the configured IP providing the lease has not expired. In the background it will try to renew the IP regularly. This has worked well in our environment.

A while back we migrated our XPs to windows 7. Our windows 7 client do not show the same behaviour as shown above. If the DHCP server is unavailable they will switch over to APIPA even though the default gateway is available. This of course means that they will not be able to communicate with resource on the network properly.

We would like to make our windows 7 clients to work the same way as our xp clients used but the problem is that we don't know in which direction to go. Knowledgebase article #958336 (https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/958336?wa=wsignin1.0) implies, that the windows 7 behaviour is different from the xp behaviour by design. It recommends to use the DontPingGateway registry value to allow windows 7 to keep using the old lease. But I guess that would make the "alternate IP configuration" feature useless.

Other articles and forum replies that I have found argue that there is NO DIFFERENCE between XP and windows 7 in this matter. Some people suggest that the problem could be switch related (PortFast configuration) or a power saving issue in windows 7. Can someone please confirm what the windows 7 behaviour is by design? Any help is appreciated!

Thanks & Regards

HarryNew

Hi

 As far as i know there isnt any diffrerence xp and win7,by the way you should prefer to use DHCP FAILOVER CLUSTER for redundancy.

Also please check step by step guide;

https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh831385.aspx