While vCloud Director can manage and track the assignment of addresses to VMs, and can track manual allocations which it requested, it is also possible to manage IP addressing outside of vCloud Director. Selecting DHCP assignment during the VM creation (see the following figure) causes vCloud Director to configure the supported guest OS to use DHCP to acquire an IP address during its boot sequence rather than during its initial configuration.

When a VM is configured to use DHCP to acquire an IP address, it requires either a DHCP server on the network to which it is connected, or, a DHCP “helper” or “proxy” on that network that can forward the VM’s request for an address assignment to an authority on a remote network. vCloud Director cannot track address utilization when DHCP is used, but it is possible to assign part of an Org VDC network’s address space to an IP pool (which would be tracked) and part to a DHCP scope (which would not be tracked). This can be useful in situations where for example, a portion of an application stack is relatively static and the rest is dynamically scaled as needed. The static portion would utilize an IP pool and because the specific addresses assigned to temporary workloads are not significant, they would use DHCP.