[arin-ppml] The non-deployment of IPv6

[Chris Engel]

John,

Both. Public facing servers in the Enterprise are generaly NAT'd behind a firewall and running on Private IP space in a DMZ anyways (that's our setup and it's pretty typical of what I've seen). So even if we were to scale up to the point where we needed more external IP space and v6 was all that was available.... the only thing we would need to do....and would likely make sense to do would be to find a perimeter device that could handle v6 to v4 NATing to support those extra external v6 IP's on it's public interface (and that's assuming I need to scale beyond my current space in the first place). In other words, why would I want to try to re-invent the wheel when I don't need to, it net's me no functional advantage for my purposes and comes at considerable cost ??

The killer question is will we be able to find robust v4 to v6 solutions when the time comes when we need to get traffic from v6 only external users or sending traffic to v6 only sites. I am assuming the answer to that question will be.... yes.....since when the time comes there is going to be a huge demand for them. If the answer to that question turns out not to be true....then I could see the need to look at dual-stacking inside the perimeter.

Chris Engel

________________________________________
From: John Curran [jcurran at arin.net]
Sent: Wednesday, December 09, 2009 10:38 AM
To: Chris Engel
Cc: arin-ppml at arin.net
Subject: Re: [arin-ppml] The non-deployment of IPv6

Chris -

  By "doing IPv6", do you mean for your internal network, desktops, and servers?  Or do you mean for your public-facing web and mail servers?

/John

John Curran
President and CEO
ARIN

On Dec 9, 2009, at 10:16 AM, Chris Engel wrote:

>
> Well, speaking for myself and the Enterprise I manage..... I see absolutely no reason to do IPv6 at the present time. There is no benefit to it and a fairly decent cost. Furthermore the paradigm is sufficiently different that it's not like it's a seemless transition from v4. If they had just taken 4 and tacked on a few more octets but made no other changes as to how it worked, that might be a bit of a different story. No surprise that many Enterprises aren't rusing to adopt. The key question for an Enterprise Admin is do you have control over the hardware and networks on which the services you provide depend?  If the answer to that is ....yes.... then looking to switch to v6 really makes no sense.
> The point at which you need to do something about v6  is when you are going to start getting external traffic (SMTP, HTTP, etc.) from v6 only users... or when your own users are going to start to want to access v6 only sites. That, I imagine is still a fair ways off.
>
> When that happens what the Enterprise Admin is most likely to look at doing is layering in support for those functions in a way that requires the MINIMUM neccesary changes to thier existing infrastructure. I imagine that will be some variety of v4 to v6 gateway services or something like that. A few years down the road, if some-one is building a new network from the ground up I could see them maybe deciding to go v6 native. However, for existing networks...as long as there are robust v4 to v6 solutions available....and I imagine there will be due to demand.... I can't see any reason to switch away from v4 native for the forseeable future.
>
>
> Chris Engel
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