Jim Popovitch wrote:
With the thousands of datacenters that exist with IPv4 cores, what will it take to get them to move all of their infrastructure and customers to IPv6?
A L2 switched (or Hubbed ? :) 'datacenter' doesn't need to do much hardware wise, install IPv6 stacks on the hosts, configure done. Most switches will happily run IPv4 and IPv6 on the same cabling, it's just a different ethertype. One thing to watch out for are switches and NIC's with broken multicast, if this is the case IPv6 Neighbour Discovery (ND) will most likely not work. As a workaround one can put interfaces in promisc/allmulti but that is sort of dirty, better replace the hardware instead. Most current OS's support this and usually the upgrade is gratuit(tm), assuming that one isn't running Win95 as a 'server' and does do regular upgrades of their software of course. This part mostly consists of normal server upgrades/updates and should not be to costly except for man hours and of course some testing. Enabling the stack of course doesn't really enable IPv6 in the applications, thus that is a second part one has to look at and will be the most time consuming. The L3 part is most likely the expensive one though, Vendor J noticed they could get a load of cash from government organizations and suddenly introduced a nice expensive additional license for IPv6. Good part is that most vendors seem to support it, they claim at least, and that the software is starting to become sort of stable. Vendor J and C implementations have been very well field tested over the years. Of course as with many new functions, if you take the standard set it will work, if you need something special expect nice creepy bugs, thus keep your support contract up-to-date and keep that backup ready. Another worthy point is of course the upgrading of management utilities. As for getting transit connectivity, shop around there are a couple of good transit providers who will be more than happy to get another customer, proofing their management that it was a good idea to already invest in a full native IPv6 network, instead of waiting for their customers to leave to another party who did already do it a long time ago.
Can it even be done or will they just run IPv6 to the core and proxy the rest?
The general idea of "IPv6 transition" is that one will run dual-stack for the forseeable future, until IPv4 is not used/required anymore, which might take a very long time. For folks who want a native IPv6 core there are a variety of possibilities to do this. Of course not a single one covers all possibilities thus one has to shop around to match the best one. Greets, Jeroen (And I most likely forgot to mention a lot of other problems and issues)