Audio transcript: Managing IP Addresses Using DHCP in Navisite Cloud Director (NCD)

Hello everyone and welcome. My name is Hannah Warren. I’m here today for Navisite, giving a brief demonstration of our Navisite Cloud Director (NCD) platform, which you can access through our Proximity login portal.

Just a quick note about today's tutorial: this is a general level tutorial with the product in its current iteration, so if you have specific questions or issues with your environment please make sure that you contact our customer service department. For a more detailed tutorial you can always visit our knowledge base, which is a link on the screen and also in the video description below. And with that, let's get started.

In this video we'll be covering DHCP or dynamic host configuration protocol. We’ll be talking about how you configure your network to enable DHCP, how you define the range of available IP addresses, and how you configure your VMs to make use of the DHCP range.

So I’ve navigated back to my vApp detail page for VM IP management, and I'm going to visit the network detail page to add a DHCP range. To do that we scroll down to IP allocation; click IP addressing; and we can see first of all that we do have a static range here with our single VM at .99. And so from here it's a pretty simple matter of clicking the button here to a DHCP range and giving it a range. So I’m going to say I want my new range to be at 180, and we’ll say let's make it to 200. Perfect. And it will be thinking about that change for just a moment or two – but you'll be able to see that range show up on this IP addressing chart.

Essentially the VMs that you configured to use DHCP will be given addresses from this range, and you really have no influence over that IP address as designed. But assuming that you've ensured that the number of VMs configured to use DHCP does not exceed the range of IPs available, then you should be in good shape. If however I were to configure a 21st VM to use DHCP and then booted all 21 of them, the 21st VM in that sequence to boot would be left without an IP address – and it also wouldn't be attached the network, which definitely creates some problems for trying to run that VM and actually do anything productive.

Now I need to go through the process of telling my VM to use DHCP in order to attach itself to my network. To do that we can close out of IP addressing and visit allocated IPs. This is my one VM at .99. It's called Test_VM, and we're going to visit its detail page. And from here we can scroll down and visit Network Interfaces, which is under Hardware. We're going to click the gear icon next to the VM (which has already been powered off), and at the Edit Network Interface page we’ll visit IP Allocation. And instead of allowing it to statically IP itself we're going to say use DHCP to get your connection to my network; click Edit Network Interface.

You're going to allow it to you make its changes here and NCD – but this is not quite the end of the process. From here we need to boot the VM so that it can recustomize, which is the term VMware uses – or basically reconfigure itself so it will take these changes that we made into effect.

So the final step in this process is to power our VM back on. Keep in mind that it was shut down and powered off before we made any changes to its IP allocation method. We’re going to power it back on, and we'll take a look at its “ifconfig” when it's finished and make sure that our changes were successful. It's possible this process may take a few seconds, but when the VM is powered on again we will open up our console, and now we can login; we’ll do a quick “ifconfig” just to make sure that our IP address has changed from its original .99. And you can see here that the current address is .180 which is coincidentally the first address available on our DHCP range that we configured.

However it's important to remember that that isn't always going to be the case. We’re going to cover all of our bases, so we’ll ensure one other way that we have correctly configured this machine to use DHCP – by using the cat, taking a quick look at network interfaces, which is the file on this machine that gives us information about how our NICs are behaving and how they're connected to our network. So we'll take a look at that, and you will see here in fact it's configured to use DHCP. Right now it has an address of .180. That could change any time, and we know at least that our machine has been configured successfully to use DHCP to connect to our network.

And that wraps up this video installment. Thanks for tuning in to this demonstration in NCD. As always we’d appreciate your feedback. If you found this video helpful or have ideas for videos in the future we do source those from comments on our content, so don't hesitate to share your thoughts with us. You can follow our YouTube channel for future videos, and there are 24x7 detailed demonstrations with screenshots and step by step how-to’s at our knowledge base: https://navisite.uservoice.com/knowledgebase

Thanks for tuning in. I'm Hannah Warren, and I’ll see you next time!