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Administrators can no longer rely upon paper records or spreadsheets to manage critical IP resources and they are rapidly realising that total DDI (DHCP, DNS and IP address) management is the only viable answer.

SOLIDserver hardware and virtual appliances from EfficientIP offer a complete DDI management solution going much further than most competing products. Their SmartArchitecture provides essential redundancy for DHCP, including Disaster Recovery Plan features and DNS services. This latest version also introduces the new and impressive Hybrid DNS engine.

With Zero Day vulnerability on BIND servers and DDoS attacks forever on the increase, Hybrid DNS is designed to protect critical name servers from hackers and avoid single points of failure. The appliance provides a second DNS engine which runs the more secure Unbound and NSD software. SmartArchitecture allows you to create fault tolerant groups of DNS servers and teams up with Hybrid DNS. In the event of an attack, it allows you to swap seamlessly from the compromised name server to an alternative one, thus avoiding network downtime.

In this review we look at the SOLIDserver virtual appliance, which we deployed in a few minutes on a VMware ESX Server 5 host system. From the console we ran basic network configuration to get the appliance up and running and then it was over to the main web interface. The documentation is far too complex and wordy, but initial setup is covered well enough. Along with providing a default DNS resolver you can enable the appliance's SPI firewall and add your own custom rules as required.

The main console opens with a dashboard where you can add extra widgets and drag them around to suit. The various features are accessed from a toolbar ribbon across the top. The IPAM (IP address management) feature integrates seamlessly with existing infrastructures and uses the concept of blocks, spaces and pools to manage IPv4 and IPv6 subnets. From the console, you can view all subnets and IP addresses and see essential details such as the percentages of used and available addresses.

Adding our Windows DHCP and DNS servers was easy enough and we just entered their FQDN and administrative credentials. Using RPC, SOLIDserver pulled in all details about our DHCP scopes and provided a complete rundown showing their status and the percentage of used IP addresses for each one.

SmartArchitecture for DHCP or DNS is simple to deploy as you select existing servers and decide how you want to implement failover. For DHCP, we provided details of our servers and a wizard offered options ranging from a single server with configuration backup, one-to-one, one-to-many and split-scope.

We used NetChange to run network discoveries which populated the SOLIDserver database with discovered SNMP devices. The IPL Lite version has basic discovery abilities whereas the full version adds functions such as switch port and 802.1x configuration. Using the NetChange tab we could view all discovered devices, see their ports and view port utilisation graphs. Selecting a switch allowed us to drill down and see all used and unused ports and connect directly to them via Telnet or a browser.

Device details can be automatically added from IPAM and NetChange to the Device Manager, which provides detailed inventory of all networking equipment. VLANs also come under SOLIDserver's remit as it can manage and report on multiple domains.

EfficientIP's SOLIDserver has the tools to scale easily from managing IP resources on mid-sized to enterprise networks. Along with a wealth of features it provides extensive problem alerting tools while the new Hybrid DNS protects critical name servers from attack.

Product: SOLIDserver 5.0.3
Supplier: EfficientIP
Tel: 0118 902 6630
Web site: www.efficientip.com
Sales: info-uk@efficientip.com