IPv6 Network Administration

Scalability

IPv4 has scaled to support the whole Internet—surprising or self-evident as that statement may be, it is still a useful observation. IPv4 has definitely had growing pains, but the Internet operates remarkably well for a global network run by hundreds of thousands of organizations in cooperation. There are few things that work as well internationally.

Why might this be? The reasons for this are partially administrative and partially technical. From a technical perspective, we would have to highlight the distributed nature of DNS, the CIDR addressing architecture, followed by independence of the underlying hardware as important features that allowed the Internet to grow to its current size using IPv4.

Administratively, the fact that IPv4 networks can be run independently by organizations, with cooperation along the network's borders, means that the problem of a central administration becoming the bottleneck for growth is reduced. In fact, this has resulted in the Internet being divided into many distinct routing domains, called Autonomous Systems, and using BGP means that each network can avoid having to know the internal details of every other network.

Given the above, IPv6 should scale at least as well as IPv4—and in fact, there's every reason to believe it can do much better than IPv4.