[Kea-users] Migration from dhcpd to Kea – preserving existing leases

[Victoria Risk]

Hi Nathan,

We have a web page on this topic, albeit it is kind of dated: https://www.isc.org/dhcp_migration/ and linked there is a tool for lease migration, which was more recently merged into the Kea Migration utility, https://gitlab.isc.org/isc-projects/keama/.  Note there is a readme on that Gitlab repo for the tool. We also have a video up on YT where Carsten Strotmann discusses planning and executing a migration. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m-EchdH6_rA).

I hope these are some help, if you wait a bit longer, you might get better help from someone who has done a migration themselves. I am pretty sure the lease migration utility will migrate leases to the Kea memfile format.

Vicky Risk



> On Apr 28, 2026, at 1:11 PM, nathan.kuly <nathan.kuly at hotmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Hello,
>> We are currently planning a migration of our DHCP infrastructure from ISC dhcpd to Kea.
>> As part of this process, we want to avoid any potential issues during the switchover, especially regarding the reassignment of IP addresses to existing clients. Therefore, it is important for us to preserve and reuse the leases that were already assigned by dhcpd at the time of the migration. Note that we are using the kea version with mysql.
>> Our goal is to ensure a smooth and transparent transition by relying on the existing lease database, so that clients can retain their current IP addresses as much as possible.
>> Do you have any recommendations or best practices for this scenario? Is there a reliable way to import or convert dhcpd leases into Kea?
>> Thank you in advance for your help and feedback.
>> Best regards,
>> Nathan
>> 
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