It's been about 4 weeks now since we've deployed Infoblox to replace our legacy VitalQIP environment and I promised a few people I would make a post with some comments and feedback.
Let me set the scale for our specific implementation. We have around 36,000 ports in the network and around 33,000 IP addresses currently in use (excludes public hotspot networks - those are managed from captive portals). In our VitalQIP environment we had 1 central Enterprise Server with 7 Remote Servers. The solution worked fairly well although it was costly to maintain and expand so we went looking for alternatives and chose Infoblox after some research and discussions.
We went with 6 Infoblox appliances, 4 1050 appliances split into 2 clusters and 2 1550 appliances for the central database (or GRID). We placed the two pair of 1050 appliances at different locations to provide additional fault tolerance and configured all our DHCP relays (IP helpers) to send DHCP requests to both clusters. The Infoblox professional services team performed the migration of the data from the VitalQIP environment and with a few small exceptions they did a good job. The migration went unnoticed by our users which was the ultimate goal. However, it's been painful trying to make the transition from VitalQIP to Infoblox for our engineering team and support staff.
In VitalQIP there was a single "namespace" where you enabled DNS and DHCP and you did so through a FAT client which was fairly fast. In Infoblox there are seperate "namespaces" for IPAM/DNS and DHCP and that has confused the staff greatly leading to some issues and problems in the whole ADD/MOVE/CHANGE process. The Infoblox web-based GUI is extremely slow on Internet Explorer 7 and 8 due to the heavy JavaScript usage. The web-based GUI is much better in Firefox and Chrome but it can still be very time consuming to get to the object or network you wish to edit or change. I've personally taken to using the Search feature every time now because it's the quickest way for me to find the object I want to either change or examine without have to navigate the maze of networks within the GUI.
The solution works well and has been reliable so far but it's been a bit of culture shock coming from VitalQIP. One of the biggest issues with VitalQIP was upgrading so I'll need to see if upgrading Infoblox will be anything like performing a VitalQIP upgrade. I performed about 5 upgrades to VitalQIP over the past 13 years and on average they took about 8 hours to complete and in some cases it took 12 hours.
Cheers!
