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

Introduction

Overview of the Book

This book is a practical guide through the process of upgrading an enterprise computer network to IPv6, a new version of one of the TCP/IP family of networking protocols used on the Internet and modern intranets. IPv6 has been mandated by the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) for the U.S. federal government to deploy ideally by June 2008, and significant gaps in the knowledge of how to accomplish that have been discovered. This book fills the need to have a single reference source on how to undertake an IPv6 transition on an enterprise network scale.

This is not a book on technology, per se. There are numerous books and other references that get into the most minute details of IPv6 technology that make excellent companions to this book, and they are mentioned where appropriate, for working out the implementation specifics unique to each network's environment, mission, and budget. Sufficient technology is presented in this book to describe the classes of tasks to be undertaken, but the fine-grain details are outside its scope.

This is a book on how to undertake successfully a large-scale technology rollout, for which IPv6 is the chosen technology. It is about taking what appears to be a Herculean problem and reducing it to manageable parts, in some cases many parts, but all manageable ones. Possibly most important, this book is about managing a transition so that you know whether you're on track, and how to fix things if you're not.

The book guides ...