IPv6 Essentials

DHCP

DHCP is widely used to configure hosts with their IPv4 addresses and additional information. If you have an IPv6 network, you do not need DHCP to configure your hosts with address information. The stateless autoconfiguration mechanism will configure your hosts for their IPv6 addresses without the need to set up a DHCP server. All you need to do is configure your IPv6-enabled routers with the prefix information for the links to which they are attached. But you might still choose to have DHCP servers in some cases. Host configuration using DHCP with IPv6 is called stateful configuration. Maybe you have a specific IPv6 addressing scheme, you need dynamic assignment of DNS servers, or you choose not to have the MAC address as a part of the IPv6 address. In these cases, you can use DHCP for address configuration. Or you have IPv6 hosts on links with no IPv6 router, in which case you would need to configure the IPv6 hosts using DHCP to distribute the prefix information. You can also combine stateless and stateful configuration by using autoconfiguration for the IPv6 address configuration and DHCP servers to provide additional configuration information.

Note that DHCPv4 can also be used to configure hosts for IPv4-compatible IPv6 addresses (see RFC 2893). The IPv4 address that is embedded in the four lowest order bytes of the IPv4-compatible IPv6 address can be obtained through DHCP and then mapped into the IPv4-compatible IPv6 address by prepending the well-known 96-bit prefix ...