I am way, way behind on my entries and I am sorry about that. I am trying to catch up on IPv6 stuff as I have been blasting away at various Microsoft, VMware and Cloud projects.
On vacation last week I tried to get caught up on some reading and watched some archives of the recent NANOG meeting (NANOG 46 in June 2009 http://www.nanog.org/presentations/archive/index.php) – yes sadly enough I do this on vacation. I viewed Dave Ward’s interestingly titled talk “It’s The End Of The World As We Know It (aka “The New Internet Architecture”)” – http://bit.ly/QOAVg. Dave had many good observations and I agree with many of his comments except one – “Dual-stack transition to IPv6 abandoned”. As someone who works with enterprise customers each and every week for IPv6 design and deployment I can safely say that dual-stack is alive and well and IS the most “pure” way of IPv6 deployment that we have today. Yes, there are operational and even security and performance challenges with running two stacks simultaneously but until something better comes along, dual-stack is all we have that gets us away from tunnels.
I know Dave is not arguing one way or the other but simply stating his views on where things are and where they may go and that is cool but I feel it is a bit radical to state that the number one methodology for IPv4/IPv6 co-existence is abandoned.
What are your thoughts on various co-existence mechanisms TODAY vs. what is being proposed by the IETF for the future?
Shannon
I agree with you – Dual Stack is the ‘right answer’ for most environment / deployment scenarios.
Assuming IPv6 is ‘the way forward’ (and I honestly believe it is!) – the only real options are “get lots of dual stack out there” or “nuke it and start afresh”. The “incrementally deployable + backwardly compatible next generation network” isn’t, so running both alongside is the only feasible solution.
Once a certain threshold of “dual-stack’edness” exists, sites may feasibly go v6 only. But that is a bit off yet.
I didn’t read the post but perhaps it means that Dual-stack is abandoned as a future transition mechanism. Dual-stack, tunneling and translation are the three transition mechanisms but dual-stack was initially envisioned to be done before v4 addresses were depleted. Now it is obvious to everyone that very few did this so *after* depletion DS is a non-starter. Translation is evil and will only work in the simplest of circumstances. This leaves tunneling with a form of large scale nat as the only practical way to transition a customer to v6 (after depletion) because v4 will be needed for a long, long time. This is mostly ISP centric. For existing enterprises DS is viable since they already have v4 addresses but even then tunneling may be the right way to go, at least to start… Bruce, gogo6
Hey Bruce, I have not talked to you since I did the Enterprise IPv6 session at the TXv6TF meeting in Houston. Yeah – I know about DS.
Your point is correct that translation is a no-go and tunnels are a way to get there ONLY if you have no other alternative. DS is operationally the best way forward. The consumer (me in this case) does not care if it is DS, tunneled or translated just so I see no performance penalty and I get what I need. If 6rd and other solutions get me that then I am fine with a non-DS environment…just give it to me now.