IPv6 Needs Smart IPAM

Regional registration agencies long ago announced that they have effectively run out of available IPv4 addresses to offer. Service providers have been assigning IPv6 addresses to companies who have no other choice than to adopt the IPv6 format in their infrastructure. The complexity of IPv6 addresses requires a sophisticated IP address management tool. With SOLIDserver™, EfficientIP offers a solution fully compliant with IPv6 to help you manage multi-tenant IPv6/v4 addressing plan and DNS/DHCP services in a fully integrated solution, ensuring performance, scalability and high availability of your
network.

Why You Need to Start Your Migration to IPv6

Throughout the world, we have effectively run out of IPv4 addresses. Service providers in Europe, for example, now have only IPv6 addresses to assign to companies asking for additional public addresses. Players such as Google and Facebook deliver their content only using IPv6 in certain networks. LinkedIn is switching off IPv4 & deploying IPv6 in 2018 in order to reduce page download times. For your partners, your customers – virtually your whole environment – migration to IPv6 is becoming compulsory.

To prevent compatibility issues between IPv4 and IPv6 technologies, it is now critical to migrate your infrastructure in line with IPv6 requirements.

Being IPv6 ready means:

• Ensuring your company remains competitive
• Preserving communications with your customers and partners
• Staying visible to the marketplace via an IPv6-compliant website
• Guaranteeing your company is prepared to support future growth and development

Migrating from IPv4 to IPv6 is a long and costly operation that presents three primary challenges.

First, IPv6 addresses are lengthy. Their format extends to 128 bits and can no longer be managed with a spreadsheet. Configurations and network infrastructure become more complex and thus more error-prone.

Secondly, the IPv4 and IPv6 will need to coexist. Migration to IPv6-only infrastructures will take several years, meaning that for a while your network will use both IPv4 and IPv6 addresses. IPv6 is not backward compatible with IPv4, and IPv4 and IPv6 are not interoperable. You will need to conduct an accurate inventory of your network infrastructure of all IPv4 address allocations and related DNS and DHCP services to prepare and plan IPv6 Transition.

Third, deploying public Internet services that support IPv6 is a major short-term project, implying to upgrade Internet connectivity, WAN routers, security systems and DNS services. Three architectural approaches can be considered to undertake this strategic project:

1. Deploy IPv6 to IPv4 Gateway
2. Deploy a dual stack Internet DMZ infrastructure
3. Deploy a dedicated and separated IPv6 DMZ

All 3 options require deploying and managing at minimum IPv6 addressing plan and DNSv6 services.