IPv6 Mandates: Choosing a Transition Strategy, Preparing Transition Plans, and Executing the Migration of a Network to IPv6

Preface

I discovered IPv6 in the summer of 2004. I don't recall exactly why IPv6 caught my eye, but when it did I realized it was going to be important to the company I was with at the time. We did network and asset discovery on very large enterprise intranets. What that meant was that we had tools that would find the paths through a network, producing a map of the network topology. We would then find as many assets as we could by interrogating every IP address in the network address ranges that the customer gave us. A large customer might have 18 Class 'A' networks, which amounts to more than 300 million addresses. Though a huge address space, our tools could cover it in less than a week, whereas our competition could take weeks or even months.

When I discovered IPv6, the first thing I realized was that this new protocol, with its vast address spaces and auto-configuration, would change how everybody did network management. It was something my company would have to consider sooner or later, because we couldn't brute-force test every IPv6 address like we did IPv4 addresses. I decided to take one of our tools, port it to IPv6, and experiment with whatever IPv6 networks I could find to see how they behaved compared to IPv4. This was by no means a priority in my company (or anywhere), because any mandatory IPv6 adoption was years away and nobody was interested in it in our circle of customers. That circle included many of the top financial, pharmaceutical, and other companies that are ...