Hello folks,

Ivailo here to talk about the new DHCP failover feature in Windows Server 2012. A real failover is finally possible. Split scopes are things of the past. Now it’s possible to configure DHCP partners in “Hot Standby” and “Load Balance” mode. Configuring DHCP failover is outside of the scope of this blog.

I would like to show you haw to forcibly remove a failed failover partner. I recently had to do this for a customer. The primary DHCP server was for some reason configured with invalid IP address (169.254.84.126) as a partner. That was not my install so I don’t have an explanation as to how this happened. In order to remove a partner in the DHCP manager the two servers have to be able to talk to each other. If one of the servers is unavailable the removal will fail. The following command can be used to force the removal of the partner:

Remove-DhcpServerv4Failover -ComputerName <server name> -Name <name of the failover partnership> -force

Ivailo Mitkov