Best Practices for DHCP

Overview of Cato DHCP

You can use Cato Networks’ DHCP service to assign IP addresses for your clients. The Cato PoPs are responsible for providing the IP addresses to the clients. Cato’s DHCP service works only for hosts that are connected to the Cato Cloud and only if you configure a DHCP range for the network. The Cato Management Application holds the persistent DHCP records and in case that the site can’t connect to the PoP and when the connection is restored it can easily reuse the DHCP records.

Note: The default IP addresses lease time setting for an account is three days. If necessary, contact Cato Networks Support to change the default settings.

For more about Cato DHCP, see Configuring DHCP Settings.

Best Practice for DHCP

This section contains best practice and recommendation for configuring DHCP with Cato.

Using Cato’s DHCP Servers for Global Coverage

We highly recommend that you use Cato’s DHCP service for your account. The advantage of working with Cato’s DHCP service is that it gives you a global coverage and you are not dependent on the WAN connectivity. It means that Cato’s DHCP server assigns an IP address to any host in your network regardless to its location and you don’t have to maintain the connectivity from that hosts to an internal DHCP server. Cato PoPs global coverage allows hosts to communicate anywhere as long as they are connected to the Cato Cloud.

Cato also allows you to configure a DHCP Relay and add your internal DHCP server for your account (Configuration>Global Settings>DHCP>DHCP Relay). Although, we recommend that you use Cato's DHCP server to improve the performance for your network. For example, if you have a site in New York and a site in Singapore and your internal DHCP server is located in New York, any DHCP requests coming from the Singapore site go to the server in New York for resolving.

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  • Comment author
    Adam Silva

    Does this work when the cato socket is being used as an edge device versus the core for the site?

  • Comment author
    Tamir Eliyahu

    Hello Adam,

    The Cato Socket supports DHCP according to your configuration.

    You can configure a DHCP range for a vlan, site, group or for the entire account.

    The Socket supports DHCP relay even when it’s a core or an edge device.

    You can choose whether to use Cato’s DHCP server and configure the DHCP range or use the Socket as a DHCP relay and add your own DHCP server.

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