IPv6 Launch day preparation

Wed Apr 11 18:03:38 UTC 2012

Hello all,

we've had an interesting day today in Paris discussing about how to prepare
the IPv6 implementation in various networks.

With a couple of vendors and software companies (Juniper, Cisco, A10
Networks, Fortinet, BreakingPoint, StoneSoft, Infoblox, PaloAlto) we
decided to make a very technical day about IPv6 transition techniques and
various ways to implement it in different type of networks.

We've had the morning for some mechanisms presentations and all the
afternoon with a lab interconnecting all the vendors and having various
scenarios to test all the mechanisms we discussed in the morning.

The lab description can be found here :
http://g6.asso.fr/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/ipv6-launch-lab.pdf

(it's in "frenglish" but really understable for english speaking only
people, personnaly I'm dual stack french/english :-) )

Actually we had :

- a Juniper MX480 with a service card to act as a eyeball network providing
IPv6 only connectivity to their customers and a NAT64 (Juniper) + DNS64
(Infoblox) to allow them to reach IPv4 only contents

- Stonesoft running a dual stack entreprise network (FW+IPS) that can reach
all IPv4/IPv6 contents

- A10 networks configured as a IPv4 load balancer and IPv6 NAT64 gateway
for contents servers using private IPv4 only address space : The IPv4 only
servers were reachable from IPv6 only machines

- PaloAlto and Fortinet as IPv4/IPv6 Firewalls

- an IPv4 only web server (to be accessible from the IPv6 only eyeball
network thanks to the NAT64+DNS64 setup)

- an IPv6 only web server

And in order to stress all the vendors hardware/software, we had breaking
point which was able to generate IPv4/IPv6 applicative traffic from several
kpps/mbps to loads of Mpps/Gbps

It was very interesting to have this setup on which anybody in the audience
was able to ask for specific test/configuration to understand all the
mechanisms.

Unfortunately we did not have a link to the DFZ to run more interesting
tests but we will probably have another Lab day with a better setup for
this (and having all the people in the audience using their laptops to
simulate eyeball customers).

Our goal was mainly to make people aware about what can be done to move
forward with IPv6 and I think we achieved this goal.

If you have any comments, feel free to reply here.

-- 
Pierre-Yves Maunier