Question

Your customer has decided to deploy IPv6 in the production environment; what technical issues might there be in an IPv6 deployment, and how might they be prevented?

Answer 1

What should organizations watch for as they develop their approach to IPv6? Clearly, some things are well known. A thorough audit is needed of all equipment and software. Staff education about IPv6 is essential, and networking policies need to be reassessed or put into place.

The issuse faced along with the prevention measures are as follows :

• Review how you will configure and track IP addresses – The most fundamental change in IPv6 is the impact this new protocol has on IP address assignment and management. With the shift from 32-bit IPv4 addressing to 128-bit IPv6 addressing, organizations must reconsider how they assign and track their IP addresses. While manual tools, such as spreadsheet programs, may have been useful in tracking IPv4-addressed networks, they become impossible to use with IPv6. The sheer length of IPv6 addresses makes human address management impractical, if not impossible. Organizations should move to automated IP Address Management (IPAM) tools that are fully IPv6-compatible, such as IPAM products from Infoblox.
• Review your DNS architecture – In later stages, when planning for IPv6 on internal networks, organizations will also need to assess the IPv6 readiness of the rest of the IP management infrastructure. Naturally, if you use Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP) for address assignment, you need to ensure your DHCP server is IPv6-compliant. But DHCP is only part of the requirements for supporting an IPv6 endpoint. IPv6 endpoint support also requires configuring IPv6 DNS domain support, DNS server addresses, network time server addresses, and more — all of which is related to the DHCP server. It is critical that the IT organization run a modern DNS infrastructure that is equipped to deliver both IPv4 (A Records) and IPv6 (AAAA Records). Both DNS and DHCP must also be interoperability-tested to ensure compatibility between the systems.
• Review your security and maintenance policies – Every organization needs to appreciate and prepare for the likelihood they will need to update their maintenance and security policies when they implement IPv6. The vulnerabilities of the IPv4 stack are well known since they have run wild for so many years, but there simply has not been the same level of experience with IPv6. As a consequence, thorough threat assessment of the new protocol is needed. Organizations, in turn, need to review their security posture as they deploy the new protocols.
• Inventory your current network infrastructure – It should go without saying that an IPv6 migration can only begin once an organization understands what’s actually deployed within their current IPv4-based network. IT must conduct a thorough analysis of its network infrastructure and how traffic is routed in order to deploy IPv6. As you implement IPv6 in each subnet, you need to make sure your path to the backbone is fully enabled for the new protocol or you will have a broken link.
• Review your application compatibility – Organizations can’t assume that their network applications will continue to function as expected on an IPv6 network. They should be tested before a switchover. The changes in the IPv6 stack imply that new TCP layer 4 protocols (TCP6 and UDP6) will be deployed, and that could impact some applications. Take VoIP, for example: the popular Asterisk PBX only became compatible with IPv6 in the fall of 2010, according to Timothy Winters, a senior manager at the University of New Hampshire Interoperability Laboratory (UNH-IOL), one of two organizations currently accredited by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), to perform the U.S. Government IPv6 (USGv6) compliance testing.
• Update your backend tools – The process of managing and troubleshooting an IPv6 network will require a new set of tools, or at the very least a revision of old ones. At both the administrative and the maintenance levels, organizations need to recheck their existing toolkits to be sure those tools are IPv6-compatible. For example, the sheer length of IPv6 addresses poses problems for some databases that are unable to store IPv6 address. Many IT managers who have neglected to check before converting have reported that analyzers and the other monitoring tools tend not be IPv6-compatible.
• Monitor network performance – IPv6 introduces changes that may impact network performance. Header size is doubled from that of IPv4, increasing to 40 bytes. In applications that rely on small packet size, there will be a noticeable impact on application performance. SIP, for example, uses small packets, on average about 1000 bytes in length. The header increase will add about 2 percent on to the packet size — not a huge increase but enough to impact extreme cases. Practically, research has shown similar differences in IPv6 performance.

       Performance is also an issue with IPv6 networking equipment. While most system vendors have some sort of IPv6 implementation strategy, the performance of systems running IPv6 protocols is likely to be suspect. The IPv6 protocol is generally supported in the firmware of many network vendors, but it is not yet optimized in silicon, notes Jerry Johnson CIO of the Pacific Northwest Laboratory. Firmware migration is an initial step, but significant deployments of IPv6 internally will require a hardware upgrade in much of the networking infrastructure to maintain the level of performance customers and employees expect today.

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