IP Planning Software

Managing your IP addresses isn’t always an easy task. For large networks with a long list of operating addresses, keeping a manual spreadsheet of addresses can be time-consuming—especially when your network is constantly expanding to accommodate new users and devices. 

The main goal of IP planning is to help make your IP configurations as efficient as possible, all from a centralized control center. IP management involves assigning new units to empty addresses, ensuring your assignments stay under your IP capacity, and solving any inefficiencies with your address configuration. 

In addition to IP address assignment, IP planning involves subnet creation and management to help maximize the efficiency of your network operations. IP addresses with the same IP address routing prefix can take less time and distance to communicate with each other. A collection of IP addresses beginning with the same prefix is called a subnet, and this is something any IP planning should take into consideration if you’re aiming to optimize traffic flow efficiency. 

Successful IP planning should also establish a strategy to monitor your DHCP servers, your DNS servers, and dynamic IP addresses that change based on capacity.

The first step in creating a subnet is to assign a unique subnet prefix to the IP addresses in your subnet with the help of a DHCP server, which controls IP address assignments.

Once you’ve established a subnet, or potentially a supernet encompassing multiple subnets, the IP addresses within your defined parameters will be available. The only exceptions to this are your network address and your broadcast address, which remain static and predefined. Once you’ve established a subnet, capacity planning should be straightforward since you won’t have to worry about dynamic IP addresses encountering unavailable addresses within your new subnet. 

For more sophisticated subnets, you can also specify ranges of IP addresses. If you’re dealing with a large subnet with many addresses, establishing IP ranges can help you organize your addresses into more specific, subsidiary units without requiring an entirely new subnet. 

Soon after the inception of the internet, a standard 16-bit IP address naming protocol was established which has continued to the present day. This 16-digit naming system is IPv4, which allows for 2^32 unique addresses. With over four billion possibilities, IPv4 was able to accommodate enough IP addresses to last until recent years, when IPv6, a 32-bit IP address system, gained prominence as the new IP naming standard. 

For those who might be concerned about their existing IPv4 resources, IPv6 migration does not eliminate existing IPv4 addresses. IPv6 migration refers to the integration of IPv6 addresses into your network when new addresses need to be named.

To establish an effective IPv6 naming system, an IP address planning tool can help centralize IP planning, detect any conflict between IP addresses, and manage DNS and DHCP servers to oversee your dynamic naming process. 

The first step in a comprehensive IP plan is to identify your network devices. Common scanning processes include ICMP scanning, SNMP scanning, and neighborhood scanning. IP plan software can help automate the scanning process and collect relevant details from your network devices. 

In your IP management plan, make sure to mark addresses no longer in use. Then, you’ll be ready to make your DHCP reservations and assign DNS names to them. 

A successful IP address plan will also include the establishment of subnets to improve traffic flow and help organize your most interactive groups of devices. Once you’ve defined your subnets, you can add more addresses in specific ranges for further segmentation.

IP address planning tools can help automate many aspects of the IP addressing process, such as discovering network devices and identifying available IP address, to help users more easily execute IP management plans. IP address planning tools can also allow you to import spreadsheets to help speed up the IP address and subnet creation process. 

Organizing your network into subnets is crucial for minimizing traffic travel time and maximizing network efficiency. The packet travel time from one IP address to another is largely dependent on the sequencing of bits at the beginning of the IP address—the more similar the initial digits on your address are, the closer the distance between addresses. Subnet planning can help increase the efficiency of your traffic flow and improve your bandwidth load.

Since IP subnet planning involves assigning and managing IP addresses beginning with the same introductory bits, you need to understand which devices on your network are interacting with each other and how often to be able to assign members of a subnet. The goal of subnet planning is to reduce the distance which network traffic must travel between highly interactive devices.

Using IP plan software like SolarWinds IP Address Manager, which is designed to let you easily create subnets as well as groups to categorize your subnets, can help make the process of creating and managing subnets easier.

SolarWinds IP Address Manager is built to offer address IP address management from a central platform. To save users time and resources, IPAM can automate many steps of the IP planning process, including setup, monitoring, and alerting.

To help set up your IP address system, IPAM is designed to consolidate DHCP/DNS management into an intuitive interface. This helps your DHCP server assign new addresses, which will then be named by your DNS server. IPAM’s DHCP scope monitor can also help with DHCP assignments by extracting scopes and emphasizing the scopes in need of more IP assignments. You can keep track of DNS server assignments more easily on your IPAM dashboard. 

In addition to assigning and monitoring a dynamic IP address system, IPAM includes innovative alerting and reporting tools. Whether it’s an IP address conflict, an address capacity shortage, or an inefficient subnet, the IPAM dashboard is designed to provide real-time alerts and reports.

In addition to comprehensive DHCP, DNS, and subnet management, monitoring, and alerts, SolarWinds IP address planning tool offers an array of other useful features. These include: 

• Integration with VMware. SolarWinds IPAM is equipped to integrate with VMware products like VMware vRealize Orchestrator (vRO) and vRealize Automation.
• Import wizard. IPAM’s import wizard leads you through the process of importing your IP and subnet information from a spreadsheet. This helpful import wizard will also help you transfer any assignments you’ve already set up based on your unique IP planning preferences. 
• Grouping and status icons. The included intuitive, visual icons can help you manage groups of subnets and other related categories. These icons are color-coded, easily sortable, and can help make your IP planning easier. 
• API solutions. IPAM uses SWIS API solutions to help streamline your IP planning experience and keep the IPAM application interface as useful and efficient as possible.