An address exclusion in a DHCP scope simply removes one or more IP addresses (or a range) from the scope’s available lease pool so the DHCP server will never hand out those addresses to any client. The AZ-800/Windows Server Hybrid Core Infrastructure guidance explains: “Use exclusions to prevent specific addresses in a scope from being leased,” noting that exclusions are commonly used to protect addresses that are statically configured on devices or reserved for other purposes. Crucially, exclusions do not associate a particular address with a particular client; they only withhold those addresses from automatic allocation. If you created exclusions “for each printer,” the server would not lease those IPs at all, and the printers would not automatically receive them. To provide deterministic assignment while still using DHCP, you must configure DHCP reservations that bind each printer’s MAC address to its intended IP. Thus, exclusions alone do not meet the requirement that the printers are always assigned the same IP address by DHCP.