Deploying IPv6 in a datacenter (Was: Awful quiet?)

Wed Dec 21 12:13:40 UTC 2005

Jim Popovitch wrote:
> With the thousands of datacenters that exist with IPv4 cores,
> what will it take to get them to move all of their infrastructure
> and customers to IPv6?

A L2 switched (or Hubbed ? :) 'datacenter' doesn't need to do much
hardware wise, install IPv6 stacks on the hosts, configure done.
Most switches will happily run IPv4 and IPv6 on the same cabling, it's
just a different ethertype. One thing to watch out for are switches and
NIC's with broken multicast, if this is the case IPv6 Neighbour
Discovery (ND) will most likely not work. As a workaround one can put
interfaces in promisc/allmulti but that is sort of dirty, better replace
the hardware instead.

Most current OS's support this and usually the upgrade is gratuit(tm),
assuming that one isn't running Win95 as a 'server' and does do regular
upgrades of their software of course. This part mostly consists of
normal server upgrades/updates and should not be to costly except for
man hours and of course some testing. Enabling the stack of course
doesn't really enable IPv6 in the applications, thus that is a second
part one has to look at and will be the most time consuming.

The L3 part is most likely the expensive one though, Vendor J noticed
they could get a load of cash from government organizations and suddenly
introduced a nice expensive additional license for IPv6. Good part is
that most vendors seem to support it, they claim at least, and that the
software is starting to become sort of stable. Vendor J and C
implementations have been very well field tested over the years.
Of course as with many new functions, if you take the standard set it
will work, if you need something special expect nice creepy bugs, thus
keep your support contract up-to-date and keep that backup ready.

Another worthy point is of course the upgrading of management utilities.

As for getting transit connectivity, shop around there are a couple of
good transit providers who will be more than happy to get another
customer, proofing their management that it was a good idea to already
invest in a full native IPv6 network, instead of waiting for their
customers to leave to another party who did already do it a long time ago.

> Can it even be done or will they just run
> IPv6 to the core and proxy the rest?

The general idea of "IPv6 transition" is that one will run dual-stack
for the forseeable future, until IPv4 is not used/required anymore,
which might take a very long time.

For folks who want a native IPv6 core there are a variety of
possibilities to do this. Of course not a single one covers all
possibilities thus one has to shop around to match the best one.

Greets,
 Jeroen

(And I most likely forgot to mention a lot of other problems and issues)

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