The History and Future of IPv6

1. The History and Future of IPv6
16th March 2011
Jan Larsson
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of its Affiliates in the United States and/or other countries. Level 3 services are provided by wholly owned subsidiaries of Level 3 Communications, Inc. Any other service names, product names, company names or logos
included herein are the trademarks or service marks of their respective owners.

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Agenda
 Level 3 IPv6 history
 IPv6 Design Goals and Implementation
 Issues and Observations
 Takeaways

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History
 Started offering tunnelled IPv6 service in May 2005.
 2005 - 2008 the solution grew and grew…
 2009 started offering dual-stack services in EU.
 Today the network is now fully dual stack enabled, GA was
July 1, 2010 and the routing ecosystem is ‘evolving’.

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Goals and Decisions
“Thou shall not break the IPv4 network”

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Supporting IPv6
 You can chose a number of ways to support IPv6 on your network:
 Transition
 Dual-stack
 Is your existing kit capable of supporting IPv6?
 You need to understand what your customers need from you before you can
make this decision.

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Platform Issues
 Most modern network hardware supports IPv6 in some way.
 Check that your software includes (full) IPv6 support.
 Check that your hardware supports IPv6, in hardware where appropriate.
 TCAM issues

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Differentiating IPv4/IPv6 Traffic
 One common problem is how to create differentiated data sets and graphs
for IPv4 and IPv6 traffic on your network.
 No easy solution, but here are two things commonly done:
 On the ‘J’ vendor, have an inet6 traffic filter inbound and outbound to count
IPv6 traffic in and out of interfaces.
 On most vendors, you could have different VLANs on a physical interface for
IPv4 and IPv6 traffic.
 You could use NetFlow, but this requires v9 and a good support.

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Other Important Factors to Consider
 Supporting IPv6 on your network is NOT the biggest issue you’ll encounter.
 Much bigger issues include:
 Training your staff
 Supporting your back-office systems
 Supporting your network management platform(s)

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Takeaways
 The most modern router and server kits do support IPv6…BUT code still has
bugs.
 Many monitoring systems etc. do not support IPv6, at least not as well as IPv4.
 Security is likely to be problematic. How many of the firewalls, AV, load
balancers, VPN and such support IPv6 properly?
 Skill base for IPv6 is still VERY low.
 If you don’t already, you really need to have a plan in place for IPv6.
 Don’t assume that activating IPv6 on your network is the only task. You may be
pulling along other organizations!

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Level 3 European Network Status
Huge backbone links with significant growth into Eastern Europe.
All sites in Eastern Europe are activated for native IPv6 service

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IPv6 With Level 3
 Level 3 already has hundreds of native IPv6 customer links in EU.
 Activation:
 If you are an existing Level 3 customer, submit a support request for IPv6 service
and it will be carried out where possible.
 If you are a new Level 3 customer, ensure you ask for IPv6 service when
speaking to your account manager.

12. Thank you
Jan Larsson