I have been pushing for IPv6 support for Cisco ACE for years now and today, finally, the first release of support is on Cisco.com.
Cisco ACE software release A5(1.0) provides several feature enhancements with IPv6 being the most important in my view.
A summary of IPv6 features added:
•Dual stack:
–IPv4-to-IPv4 and IPv6-to-IPv6
–HTTP and DNS inspection for native IPv6-IPv6 traffic
•Translation:
–SLB64, SLB46 for all Layer 4 load balancing which do not require payload modifications or pinholes
–NAT64, NAT46 for all TCP and UDP protocols which do not need payload modifications or pinholes
–SLB64 and SLB46 support for Layer 7 load balancing for HTTP and SSL protocols.
–No DNS64 or DNS46 support on ACE
•Mixed IPv4 and IPv6 real server support
•IPv6 addressing, including link-local, global unicast, unique local, peer, and alias addresses.
•IPv6 protocol support:
–Neighbor Discovery (ND)
–Router Discovery (RD)
–Duplicate Address Detection (DAD)
–ICMPv6
–DHCPv6
•Application awareness: HTTP, HTTPS, and DNS
•Online Certificate Status Protocol (OCSP) support for authenticating Secure Socket Layer (SSL) offloaded sessions, for both IPv6 and IPv4 support
•DM GUI changes in A5(1.0):
–Support for the IPv6 and SSL OCSP features and functions outlined above.
–Updated look and feel to the DM GUI and all associated pages.
–Homepage—A launching point to selected areas within the DM GUI. It appears under the Home option menu. Homepage includes quick access to a series of operational tasks, monitoring functions, Guided Setup tasks, configuration functions, and quick links to the associated user documentation.
–Guided Setup—Provides a series of setup sequences that offers screen guidance and networking diagrams to simplify the configuration of the ACE appliance through the DM GUI.
–Network monitoring enhancements:
Dashboards—Allows faster and more accurate assessment and analysis of device and virtual context health and usage, as well as performance. Corresponding monitoring views allow for quick access to details for further investigation into potential problems highlighted in the dashboards. Graphs, as well as monitoring screens, allow you to view historical data and compare the performance with the peer objects.
Historical Graphs—Displays data recorded during the last hour, 2-hour, 4-hour, 8-hour, 24-hour interval, or 30-day (last month) interval. There is also support for real-time charts as part of the monitoring graphs feature
Dedicated Real Server and Probe Views—Displays load-balancing information that is related to real servers and the probes that monitor the health and availability of a real server.
Topology Maps—Provide a graphical representation of an application network.
Cisco ACE A5(1.0) Configuration Documentation: http://bit.ly/pKQxIq
Cisco ACE A5(1.0) Release Notes: http://bit.ly/oO0Skn
Slideshare configuration examples I have built on Cisco ACE SLB66/SLB64, ASR1k Stateful NAT64 and proxy: http://t.co/RLVof3jU



Good to hear Cisco making good forward progress on their “IPv6-by-the-end-of-the-year” goal
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Hi Shannon,
Great to see Cisco finally supporting IPv6 on some datacenter gear; nice slideshow too. Your example shows IPv6 (only) external clients using ACE to access IPv4 internal servers. Is it also possible to use the ACE to enable internal IPv6 only clients (with a DNS64 service) to access external IPv6 only servers (via stateful NAT64 on ACE with A5 1.0 s/w) ?
Sorry for the delay Pete. The Cisco ACE supports both SLB64 (IPv6 to IPv4 in either direction) and also supports SLB66 (IPv6 in either direction). So, yes you can do this, but based on your scenario I am not sure why you need translation, DNS64 or even SLB. If I have an internal IPv6 client I can just do normal DNS and go out to the external IPv6 servers. No special DNS64 needed nor do I need translation. Do you mean IPv6-only clients going to IPv4-only external servers?