📖 ~1 min read
Table of contents
Symptom & Impact
Failover pair stops synchronizing leases, increasing risk of duplicate assignment or lease denials during node outages.
Environment & Reproduction
Common after firewall changes, time drift, or one-sided scope edits. Reproduce by blocking partner communication port.
Root Cause Analysis
Partner communication loss or database divergence prevents normal state transitions back to Normal from interrupted states.
Quick Triage
Validate partner reachability, service health, and scope consistency on both servers before initiating reconciliation.
Step-by-Step Diagnosis
Check failover relationship state, compare scope checksum, and review event IDs indicating replication or authentication failures.
Solution – Primary Fix
Restore connectivity, resync failover relationship, and reconcile leases so both partners return to Normal state.
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Solution – Alternative Approaches
If reconciliation fails, recreate failover relationship during controlled maintenance to reset replication baseline.
Verification & Acceptance Criteria
Partner state remains Normal, lease updates replicate bi-directionally, and no duplicate lease incidents are observed.
Rollback Plan
Revert to single-server authoritative service briefly if failover reconfiguration introduces client instability.
Prevention & Hardening
Monitor failover state transitions and enforce configuration parity checks for all shared scopes.
Related Errors & Cross-Refs
May align with DNS registration lag, VLAN ACL problems, and endpoint connectivity flaps during peak churn.
Related tutorial: View the step-by-step tutorial for Windows Server 2022.
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Browse all common problems & solutions on the Tutorials Hub.
References & Further Reading
Use Microsoft DHCP failover operational guidance for safe recovery and resilient dual-server design.
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