The NSX software in your VMware Cloud Director environment provides the capability for the edge gateway to relay DHCP messages to DHCP servers external to your VMware Cloud Director organization virtual data center. You can configure the DHCP relay capability of the edge gateway.

As described in the NSX Administration documentation, the DHCP servers can be specified using an existing IP set, IP address block, domain, or a combination of all of these. DHCP messages are relayed to every specified DHCP server.

You must also configure at least one DHCP relay agent. A DHCP relay agent is an interface on the edge gateway from which the DHCP requests are relayed to the external DHCP servers.

Prerequisites

If you want to use an IP set to specify a DHCP server, verify that an IP set exists as a grouping object available to the edge gateway. See Create an IP Set for Use in Firewall Rules and DHCP Relay Configuration by Using Your VMware Cloud Director Tenant Portal.

Procedure

  1. Open Edge Gateway Services.
    1. In the top navigation bar, click Networking and click Edge Gateways.
    2. Select the edge gateway that you want to edit and click Services.
  2. Navigate to DHCP > Relay.
  3. Use the on-screen fields to specify the DHCP servers by IP addresses, domain names, or IP sets.
    You select from existing IP sets using Add ( Add button) button to browse the available IP sets.
  4. Configure a DHCP relay agent and add its configuration to the on-screen table by clicking the Add (Add button) button, selecting a vNIC and its gateway IP address, and then clicking Keep.
    By default, the Gateway IP Address matches the primary address of the selected vNIC. You can keep the default or select an alternate address if one is available on that vNIC.
  5. Click Save changes.