Self-Paced Training Kit (Exam 70-642): Configuring Windows Server® 2008 Network Infrastructure

Lesson 3: Understanding IPv6 Addressing

IPv4 provides 4.3 billion unique possible addresses. This might sound like a large number, but because of the exponential growth of the Internet, the public IPv4 address space is starting to become exhausted. As of this writing, the IANA has already allocated the last available /8 IPv4 address blocks to regional Internet registries, and the first regional registries are expected to run out of IPv4 addresses in mid-2011.

IPv6 was designed primarily to resolve this problem of IPv4 address exhaustion. In place of the 32-bit addresses used by IPv4, IPv6 uses 128-bit addresses. This larger IPv6 address space provides 2¹²⁸, or 3.4 undecillion (3.4 x 10³⁸) unique addresses. Compared to the number of IPv4 addresses, ...