Is it possible to disable a single DHCP pool in IOS?

Question

I am working on a Cisco L3 switch where most of SVIs are having ip helper-address configured for DHCP relay but also a couple of DHCP pools have been configured in the switch itself to serve dynamic addresses to a couple of VLANs.

I'm planning some changes where I would like to disable only one of the DHCP pools in the switch. So far, I have read about the following options related to disabling DHCP in IOS:

• Adding no service dhcp in global config: not suitable for my scenario, as it would disable all DHCP relay and all DHCP pools.
• Deleting configuration for the pool to be disabled: this would work in my scenario but I would like to keep the pool configuration in running config, just in case I need to rollback the change.

So my question is: for an IOS based device, is there a way to disable a single DHCP pool while keeping the pool configuration in running config? Something like shutdown for an interface?

Answer 1

Well, one way to do this would be to exclude the entire pool from assignment. This would leave the configuration of the pool in there and you would just remove the exclusion if you wanted it to assign addresses again.

ip dhcp excluded-address <first address> <last address>

However, I would just archive a copy of the config and remove the pool.

Answer 2

You could create dummy VRF and associate the pool to that VRF. Not exactly clean solution, but seems to satisfy your requirement.

ip vrf NO_DHCP
  rd 1:1
!
ip dhcp pool foo
  vrf NO_DHCP

Answer 3

It's not quite what you wanted, but you could also remove the 'network ...' statement from the pool.

Answer 4

That is what I do, removing only the network statement, leaving all the other options in. When I need to switch over to this DHCP, I add back in just the network statement.