IP Address Management (IPAM)

As the number of networking devices increases, it becomes more important to assign and track IP addresses with more than just spreadsheets or via email requests. The old way of pinging an IP address, checking a spreadsheet, or looking at the DHCP server leases is not longer reliable and scalable.

A good way to avoid the older and more manual ways of managing IP addresses is to implement an IP address management solution.

Internet Protocol (IP) address management (IPAM) is a means of planning, tracking, and managing the Internet Protocol address space used in a network. Most commonly, tools such as DNS and DHCP are used in tandem to perform this task, though true IPAM will glue these services together so that each is aware of changes in the other (for instance DNS knowing of the IP address taken by a client via DHCP, and updating itself accordingly). Additional functionality, such as controlling reservations in DHCP as well as other data aggregation and reporting capability, is also common. IPAM tools are increasingly important as new IPv6 networks are deployed with larger address pools, different subnetting techniques, and more complex 128-bit hexadecimal numbers which are not as easily human-readable as IPv4 addresses. IPv6 networking, mobile computing, and multihoming require more dynamic address management and are causing technical obsolescence of the early generations of IP address management (IPAM) software and spreadsheets used for address manageme. [source]

Free IP Address Management (IPAM) Software

Instead of installing IPAM software from scratch (allocate hardware, operating system, software, etc) to track the ever increasing number of IP addresses in your network. I recommend downloading a free IPAM virtual machine offered by a company named Infoblox to test to see if an IPAM solution is right for you.

Infoblox’s free IPAM software solution has the following features:

• On demand and scheduled network discovery of devices
• Unified repository of IP address and asset information
• On demand and scheduled network discovery of devices
• Ability to assign values to the standard IPAM attributes e.g. device type, operating system etc.
• Graphical representation of IPs (IPMap)
• Graphical representation of networks (NetMap)
• Ability to organize IP addresses in smart folders
• Wizard for creating new networks
• Wizard for assigning new IP address

Download Free IPAM Software

The virtual machine be downloaded from here.

I’m running the IPAM virtual machine on a VMWare ESX server and had to convert if from a VMWare workstation virtual machine to a VMWare ESX server virtual machine.

IPAM Virtual Machine Requirements

If you plan to run the software on VMWare Player (free) the requirements are below.

Operating System:
Windows 2000, Windows XP SP2,
Window Vista
Disk Space:
1GB
RAM:
Minimum 512MB

Getting Started with Free IPAM Software

My notes below are on what I did after getting virtual machine running.

1. Changing IP address configuration of a static address
2. Add my subnet
3. Configured discovery process for my subnet
4. Started discovery process
5. Reviewed list of discovered IP addresses
6. Made any comments about discovered IP addresses

Discovered Devices by IPAM Software

Device Address List

Free IPAM Software License

This software is intended for trial purposes per language below from download license agreement.

LIMITED TRIAL LICENSE. Subject to the terms of this Agreement, Infoblox grants you a nonexclusive, non-transferable limited license to internally reproduce, install and use the Software only in
object code form to evaluate the Software. This limited trial license does not permit you use to the
Software to manage more than 500 IP addresses.

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Filed under: WLAN Design, WLAN Tools