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It's about just rolling it out piece by piece.
Start at the edge, and work in.
We started looking at IPv6 for ourselves fairly recently...
...but we've rolled them out onto some customer networks...
...over the course of the last two or three years.
Our own deployment happened about three months ago...
...and we've had a policy to dual stack every new service that we roll out onto our own network...
...since that deployment on our edge.
During our own implementation we haven't actually run into any bugs...
...and I believe that's thanks to the work of the community...
...for the previous ten or fifteen years.
We find that it's actually quite stable and reliable.
A number of other networks have said that particular equipment had bugs...
...with regards to addresses no longer responding for example...
...but vendors in our experience are taking this seriously...
...because they want to run consistently reliable IPv4 and IPv6 addressing products.
challenges
We have customers with specific load balancers and firewalls that they selected...
...that have a particular feature that they need so they are tied to that vendor...
...and that vendor is maybe moving slowly or they maybe want to end-of-life the product...
...or something along those lines.
We're finding that sometimes a customers' hands are tied...
...because they're required to use a feature that isn't in the softwares that they use.
now
I think that now it's possible to just switch it on for people...
...whereas before you were maybe running beta or engineering code...
...if you wanted an IPv6 feature...
...whereas today it's production ready in a bunch of kit...
...that isn't expensive and is well documented.
So if you want to do an IPv6 rollout it's possible...
...to just read around the subject widely, and plan a rollout.
monitoring
It's easy to monitor IPv4 and IPv6 and it's also necessary...
...to monitor IPv4 and IPv6 because the way the Internet edges are configured...
...you can have a different topology of how you see your peers over IPv4...
...and how you see them over IPv6.
cost
The cost of rolling out IPv6 wasn't huge to us...
...because we'd already selected kit when we bought it...
...that we would be able to do IPv6 in the future.
So, we look for IPv6 support in our routers...
...and we run Linux on our servers...
...which has been IPv6 capable for a long time.
So we didn't find that we had to go out and buy anything new.
The service providers that we partner with for connectivity...
...we told them we wanted to do IPv6 and most of them...
...were actually ready to roll out service.
planning
If you look for reasons to make the IPv6 rollout complicated...
...it's going to go wrong.
You should just roll out IPv6 support at your edge...
...through to your core, in a simple process.
A light touch so that you've got IPv6 routing possible first...
...and then maybe IPv6 DNS...
...and then maybe some of your NOC services so your staff are trained...
...and then maybe your mail services...
...so you can monitor them service by service...
...and just prove that the IPv6 rollout has been a success.
IPv4
There are going to be some options to extend the life of IPv4...
...but are they going to be as good as rolling out IPv6? I don't believe so.
I think that IPv6 enables us to preserve the end-to-end principle as much as possible...
...which is the reason for innovation on the Internet.
It's fine for IPv6 to just be an addressing format...
...because the only problem we are trying to solve is running out of addresses.
Feature compatibility with IPv4 means that it's easy to understand...
...and easy to roll out and there are fewer new things to learn.
act now
Read around the subject widely, realize it's not very difficult...
...don't make it complicated and roll it out today.
www.ipv6actnow.org