On Mon, 8 Jul 2002 19:47:52 -0400, "Phil Rosenthal" <pr@isprime.com> said:
As far as I can tell, neither Foundry Bigiron, nor Cisco 65xx support IPV6 (I could be wrong).
It is rumored that Cisco has software for the 6500 that does IPv6, albeit "in software" on the MSFC. And I'm sure they have plans to support IPv6 in hardware on this platform at some point. Foundry has something like "protocol-specific VLANs", which allows you to bridge IPv6 traffic, while (Layer-3-) routing IPv4.
While they probably aren't the most popular routers, they are very popular, and im sure plenty of cisco's smaller routers don't support it either.
The smaller routers are generally not a problem as long as they have enough memory to run recent IOS releases, and I think the bloat is mainly due to new functions other than IPv6. An interesting question is what it would take to support IPv6 on appliance-like routers such as IP-over-Cable or -xDSL CPE. In the retail space I actually see some interest in running IPv6, because it makes it much more feasible to operate a small network at home, and I have the impression that home users now lead enterprises in terms of IPv6-enabled OS deployment (Windows XP and Linux in particular).
How ready is the 'net to transit to IPV6 in the future?
Let's say that most ISPs could satisfy the current demand :-) Even though there are relatively few high-performance implementations (read: ASIC-based IPv6 forwarding as Juniper has) out there, a modest amount of IPv6 traffic could be carried "natively" on most networks. If you need higher performance and don't have hardware forwarding for IPv6, you can always tunnel in IPv4 (or, shudder, MPLS) at the edges. You may also want to do this if you don't really need the IPv6 performance, but would like to protect the control plane of your production (IPv4) service from the additional CPU load (IPv6 traffic as a DOS on your RPs :-).
Should everyone be factoring in replacing big routers with IPV6 being the only reason?
Sure, provided everyone has infinite amounts of money, or the additional revenue from IPv6 justifies the investment. Honestly I don't think either is the case today for most of us, except where some form of public funding exists, for example through innovation/research subsidies or tax breaks for enterprises using IPv6.
Just curious on others' opinions on this. -- Simon.