DHCP Snooping

Hello Sumant

Take a look at the following diagram:

Here we have an L3 switch that has three VLANs configured on it. We want each VLAN to be assigned an IP address in the range shown, but we want to create only a single DHCP server. We have a DHCP server with an IP address of 172.16.55.20 which is completely outside of the VLANS we want to serve. In order for DHCP broadcast packets to reach this DHCP server, we configure the following command on the interface of the L3 that functions as the default gateway of EACH VLAN. So, on the VLAN 10, VLAN 20 and VLAN 30 interfaces, we enter the command ip helper address 172.16.55.20.

The result will be that any broadcast DHCP requests sent by a host on VLAN 20 for example, will reach all hosts in that VLAN including the gateway, that is, the VLAN 10 interface. This interface is configured to send such traffic in unicast form to the IP address of the DHCP server. The server receives this traffic, sees from which subnet the request is being made, and finds a free IP address within the scope that corresponds to that subnet. The response is unicast to the L3 switch, and is then broadcast to the appropriate subnet to reach the requesting host.

So you don’t need to configure subinterfaces. All you need is to ensure that the default gateway of the subnet you are configuring will have the ip helper address command to relay packets to the appropriate DHCP server.

I hope this has been helpful!

Laz

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