Administering Windows Server Hybrid Core Infrastructure (AZ-800) 2025 – 400 Free Practice Questions to Pass the Exam

The high availability option that supports hot standby to provide the DHCP service is DHCP Failover. This feature allows two DHCP servers to work together in providing IP address leases to clients. In a hot standby configuration, one server is actively serving the clients, while the other server stands by to take over in the event of a failure. This ensures that the DHCP service remains highly available with minimal downtime; if the active server fails, the standby server can immediately start servicing requests without requiring manual intervention or long recovery times.

DHCP Failover also allows for synchronization between the primary and standby server, ensuring that lease information remains consistent across both servers. This is critical for maintaining a seamless experience for clients and preventing the possibility of IP address conflicts.

In contrast, other options such as DHCP clustering typically involve multiple servers managed together, focusing on load balancing rather than the specific hot standby functionality that DHCP Failover provides. DHCP split scopes distribute IP address ranges across two servers to ensure some degree of availability, but it does not implement a true hot standby mechanism where one server is always ready to take over. DHCP relay is a feature used to forward DHCP requests from clients on one network segment to a DHCP server located on a different segment, and does not provide high availability for the DHCP