Plan and Design IPAM
Applies To: Windows Server 2012 R2, Windows Server 2012
Microsoft introduced the IP Address Management (IPAM) feature in Windows Server® 2012 with improvements in Windows Server® 2012 R2. For information about new features of IPAM in Windows Server 2012 R2, see What's New in IPAM.
IPAM provides a built-in framework for discovering, monitoring, auditing, and managing IP address space and infrastructure servers on a corporate network.
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For detailed, step-by-step deployment guidance, see Deploy IPAM.
For IPAM administration, troubleshooting, and best practices guidance, see Manage IPAM.
In this guide
This guide provides an overview of IPAM, including design and planning information. Topics in this guide apply to all versions of Windows Server that include IPAM. Differences that are present in specific operating system versions are noted where applicable. The following topics are available in this guide:
Getting Started with IPAM: Provides a quick start for configuring and using IPAM.
IPAM Architecture: Describes the primary components of IPAM and how they interact.
IPAM Deployment Planning: Provides IPAM requirements, options and specifications.
IPAM Terminology: Displays a list of new concepts and terms used in IPAM.
A brief description of the benefits of IPAM is also provided below.
Benefits of IPAM
Planning, integrating, troubleshooting, and managing the IP infrastructure devices, systems, users, and networks can be a daunting task in business today. The number and variety of network enabled devices is growing exponentially, and increased adoption of technologies such as IPv6, VoIP, and network virtualization makes the job of network administration more complex than ever. Administrators are commonly required to manage multiple data centers at central offices, branch offices, and other remote locations.
IPAM provides a central and integrated experience for IP address management that replaces manual, work intensive tools such as spreadsheets and home-grown scripts that can be cumbersome, unreliable and difficult to scale.
Benefits and uses of IPAM include:
Server administration and management
DHCP and DNS record creation and deletion
Service and zone monitoring of DNS services
Support for concurrent client sessions
Remote administration support using Windows Server 2012 and Windows 8
Support for backup, restore, and migration scenarios for IPAM server
Multi-entity management and monitoring of DHCP services and DHCP scopes
Server and server group custom views and tagging
Role based access control
Agentless management of server roles
For more information about using IPAM to administer DNS and DHCP servers, see Multi-server Management.
Planning and organization of address space
IPv4 and IPv6 address space allocation
Static IP address inventory and lifetime management
IPv4 and IPv6 address space custom views and tagging
IP address space utilization statistics and trend monitoring
Organizing and visualizing of data into user-defined hierarchical logical groups
Built-in relational database support leveraging Windows Internal Database (WID)
Graphical reporting with Windows PowerShell export support
Extensive support for user-defined and built-in custom fields
For more information about using IPAM to manage IP address space on your network, see Managing IP Address Space.
Flexibility and automation
Automatic server role discovery using Active Directory
Automatic server configuration data collection and dynamic address space discovery
Group Policy based automated deployment
Detailed data collection tasks with configurable periodicity
Flexible support for import and export of IP address space from spreadsheets and management tools
Support for update of IP address space from systems such as System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) and non-Microsoft DHCP servers using Windows PowerShell
For more information about server discovery and automated data collection with IPAM, see IPAM Architecture and Managing Server Inventory.
Forensics
IP address lease and logon event tracking
Advanced search and filter support
Configuration change event auditing for DHCP and IPAM services
DHCP lease tracking by IP address, client ID, host name, and user name
For more information about using IPAM to monitor configuration changes and track IP address on the network, see Operational Event Tracking and IP Address Tracking.