Solar Winds IP Address Management provides automated vendor-independent DHCP, DNS, and IP Address Space Management. It's an excellent, robust tool and provides lots of customization and flexibility in managing IP addresses throughout a business' infrastructure. Starting at $2K, it's not cheap; but, if you need the functionality it can provide, it's well worth the price.
Managing IP Adresses
IP address management is a critical part of managing a network. Avoiding conflicts, successfully creating subnets, and keeping tabs on DHCP-assigned addresses are all key to a smoothly-running network. Network administrators can manage some aspects of IP addresses through DHCP and DNS servers deployed on the network, but management options are limited and if you are dealing with several different subnets, management can become a nightmare just relying on DHCP or DNS server interfaces alone.
Microsoft recently added IP address management (IPAM) to its latest Windows server operating system, Server 2012. Native IPAM support in a Windows OS is a welcome new feature for many server administrators who have been mostly relying on third-party IPAM solutions. However, in my testing, IPAM support via Windows alone still has some limitations such as its inability to automatically discover non-Microsoft devices.Therefore, larger organizations with several subnets or many network nodes that may be considering an upgrade to Windows Server 2012 will likely still have to rely on a third-party IPAM solution. Solar Windows IP Address Manager is a worthy consideration.
This software does not come cheap, however. Pricing starts at $1,995 and licensing is based on the number of used IP address in your organization. Solar Windows and other companies offer free IPAM tools that may be useful for networks with few subnets and nodes, but if you are looking for the ultimate in IPAM, IP Address Manager is worth the price.
Install
Solar Winds offers a fully-functioning 30-day trial that can be downloaded from the company's site. IP Address Manager is a stand-alone application that I easily installed on a Windows 7 client Windows 7 to manage IP addresses on a Server 208 R2 domain. Installation requires Microsoft's .NET framework either version 3.5 SP1 or 4.0. Running IP Address manager also requires IIS. You can perform a manual install to use with an existing SQL server database, otherwise, you can do the automated install and the Solar Windows software will install SQL Server Express.
This is a Windows-centric application, though it will also discover non-Windows IP addresses. Running it on a Windows 7 machine provided a smooth install and peppy performance.
You can set up IP Address Manager to login with a Windows domain account. After first install, you just use the default username and password displayed at first login to get into the interface and then you can change to a Windows account for login.
Features and Navigation
The first screen displayed is Discovery Central. This is where you can enter a subnet, import a file containing IP addresses in your organization, or add a DHCP or DNS server?all for discovering IP addresses.
I entered my network's subnet information. Every IP address, even ones assigned to virtual machines, was discovered in a few minutes on my rather small testing network.
Once discovery is complete, the IP Address Manager interface displays all IP addresses and associated information such as the address' status (if it's a reserved, used, or available address, for example), hostname, MAC address, DNS records, response time to a Ping, and more information.
You can also switch into a chart view. This displays a pie graph of the percent of IP addresses used, available, transient, and reserved. I easily saw that 94 percent of IP addresses in my subnet were available.
Clicking on a specific IP address and then on "View Details" option shows even more specific information about that network node such as IP address history, aliases, and lease expiration. You can also view information on IPv6 addresses.
?Solar Windows' IPAM software also includes some powerful tools. One is a subnet allocation wizard. This tool lets you allocate subnets from one specific supernet, a process that can get messy if you just try to do the same using DHCP and DNS servers. Of course, there are myriad reports you can run, and it's easy to import and export IP address information.
The key to this software is centralization. Administrators can quickly view all IP address information via a dashboard, which is accessible by clicking the "Home" tab in the interface. The dashboard allows you to quickly add subnets, DNS or DHCP servers for discovery as well as get a quick glance which subnets have the most used IP addresses, top DHCP scopes in use, or you can search for a specific IP address?a good resource if you are trying to troubleshoot a problematic network device or client.
The dashboard also integrates with the Thwack community. This is a forum for getting help using the product as well as information about new features and capabilities as the software is updated.
Administrators also have the ability to customize IP Address Manager. You can add custom IP Address information as well as tailor the look of the interface and what's displayed.
Powerful IPAM
There's no question that Solar Winds IP Address Manager provides powerful IP Address Management. The question is, do you need it? Smaller networks, probably not?it's likely overkill and too expensive. But if IP address management is crucial to running your infrastructure, look into Solar Windows IPAM, a 4.5 out 5 star Editors' Choice for networking utilities.
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