Third-party DHCP, DNS?

I have two 2k3 servers, each running WINS, DHCP and DNS. I have been
asked to find third-party replacements which will properly replicate.

My WINS servers are set for push/pull on each server. That works fine.

My DNS is intergrated in AD, and that seems to work fine. However, some
information does not seem to replicate, namely individual forwarders
defined in each server. That's not fine.

My DHCP is split-scopes. DHCP does no replication, so reservations are
manually entered into each DHCP. That's also not fine.

This morning, we lost a DHCP/WINS/DNS server, and lost some important
DNS forwarders which were defined on that server, but not defined on
the secondary.

We're also loosing the dead portion of our split-scopes as clients try
to renew to the now-dead server.

So far I've found two possible products which may be good, but I'd like
to know if anyone else has more information, suggestions, etc. VitalQIP
by Lucent and MetaInfo seem to both have DHCP and DNS servers which can
properly replicate. Anyone have experience with either, or other
alternatives?

Thanks.

You might want to review Microsoft's DNS design. AD can not run without MS
DNS. You can do dhcp from a 3rd party server but then you lose dynamic
updates for DNS.

Have you considered opening a tech support session with MS concerning your
DNS issue? It is strange that you are having to add dns forwarders on a
regular basis.

Hi,

DNS server must support:
* The service location (SRV) resource record, as described in the Internet
draft, "A DNS RR for specifying the location of services (DNS SRV)."
* Dynamic updates in DNS, as described in RFC 2136.

As alternative to Microsoft DNS server, UNIX BIND server is often used...

Personally I don't think there is anything wrong with Microsoft DNS or DHCP
server. I have quite a few customers running them (some of them with more
then 4000 users and computers as part of Active Directory) and there were no
issues.

Maybe you should first learn how to run these Microsoft services before you
decide that they don't suite you need. Some of above mentioned customers
also first decided to run DNS on BIND, but later changed their mind and
moved to Microsoft DNS.

--
Mike
Microsoft MVP - Windows Security

<(E-Mail Removed)> wrote in message
news:(E-Mail Removed) ups.com...
>I have two 2k3 servers, each running WINS, DHCP and DNS. I have been
> asked to find third-party replacements which will properly replicate.
>
> My WINS servers are set for push/pull on each server. That works fine.
>
> My DNS is intergrated in AD, and that seems to work fine. However, some
> information does not seem to replicate, namely individual forwarders
> defined in each server. That's not fine.
>
> My DHCP is split-scopes. DHCP does no replication, so reservations are
> manually entered into each DHCP. That's also not fine.
>
> This morning, we lost a DHCP/WINS/DNS server, and lost some important
> DNS forwarders which were defined on that server, but not defined on
> the secondary.
>
> We're also loosing the dead portion of our split-scopes as clients try
> to renew to the now-dead server.
>
> So far I've found two possible products which may be good, but I'd like
> to know if anyone else has more information, suggestions, etc. VitalQIP
> by Lucent and MetaInfo seem to both have DHCP and DNS servers which can
> properly replicate. Anyone have experience with either, or other
> alternatives?
>
> Thanks.
>