Microsoft DNS and BIND to Infoblox migration

DNS and DHCP migrations look simple on a whiteboard and fail in the details: a forgotten conditional forwarder, a DHCP option only one scope used, an application that hard-codes a server address. I’ve led many of these migrations, and the plan below comes from what went wrong the times it did.

How a migration runs

1. Discovery. Inventory every DNS server, zone, forwarder and delegation, and every DHCP server, scope, reservation and option. Capture query and lease volumes so the new grid is sized correctly.

2. Audit and cleanup. Find stale records, duplicate zones, overlapping scopes and options nobody remembers setting. Decide what moves, what gets fixed and what gets retired.

3. Active Directory planning. For AD-integrated zones, decide how Infoblox and the domain controllers will divide the work: whether Infoblox hosts the AD zones with GSS-TSIG dynamic updates, or the domain controllers keep _msdcs and related zones and Infoblox handles the rest.

4. Build and import. Stand up the grid, import zones and scopes, and validate record counts and responses against the old servers before anything is cut over.

5. Cutover. Move DHCP scope by scope and DNS by resolver, with clients pointed at Infoblox in stages. Every step has a written rollback.

6. Handover. Documentation of what was built and training for the team that will run it.

Sources I migrate from

• Microsoft DNS and DHCP, including AD-integrated zones
• BIND
• ISC DHCP
• Older Infoblox grids being consolidated or upgraded