IPv6 Network Administration

Managing IPv4 and IPv6 Coexistence

IPv4 and IPv6 will no doubt continue to coexist in your network for some years. Taking on this additional management burden successfully involves considering some entirely new questions, but many problems turn out to have answers that are simple extensions of the IPv4 answer. For the others, we outline what the best current practice consensus is, inasmuch as that is known!

Bandwidth planning

Bandwidth planning is probably the least important of the considerations, but worth having a strategy for nonetheless. It's our expectation that since traffic is essentially driven by user needs—whether those needs are fulfilled over IPv4 or IPv6—there's probably going to be little enough variation in the bandwidth used. However, there is the chance that a wildly popular IPv6 application, say peer-to-peer networking a lá Microsoft's Three Degrees, might appear, creating new demand for bandwidth. Also, if your IPv6 infrastructure is physically separate, you will obviously have to dimension that accordingly. If it is not separate, there may be the potential for IPv4 traffic to suffer at the hands of IPv6, or vice versa, if there is congestion.

Network management

Incorporating network management is, despite implementation difficulties, relatively easy from a decision-making point of view. Either your commercial software package supports it, or it doesn't, in which case you've to build a separate IPv6 management infrastructure (ouch) or get a new package. And if you've ...