Planning for IPv6

Chapter 2. Planning for IPv6

This chapter is all about planning for IPv6. It outlines methodologies and procedures, describes the steps and stages of the planning process, and discusses different areas such as routing, security, and central services like DNS and IP address management.

People often ask for best practices. But for IPv6, there aren’t really any best practices yet because we don’t have years of operational experience from which we can say that something has proven to work well. So we need to draw from our operational experience with IPv4 networks and apply what we have learned about IPv6 so far.

The more time we have for planning and testing, the more likely it is that we can deploy IPv6 in digestible steps and the better we can learn from and adapt with each step. This is the main reason to start as early as possible.

Business Relevance

Part of your IPv6 planning should be to identify any business relevance for IPv6 deployment. Business relevance may include products or services that communicate over a network and are sold commercially or used for business operations. Google, Facebook, and many other companies have chosen to expose their content over both IPv4 and IPv6, ensuring that customers can reach them regardless of the Internet protocol version the customer uses. Products from Sony PlayStation to Panasonic Internet pet cams to Canon network printers to most current cell phones support IPv6.

What Are You Talking About?

I notice that in many discussions of IPv6 integration, ...