How hard to migrate from IPV4 to IPV6

[arnold]

How hard is to migrate from IPV4 to IPV6 and what is the advantages of using IPV6.

[jsw6]

You don't really migrate from IPv4 to IPv6 yet, and indeed, that may never be practical. What you do today is run a "dual stack," where you have both IPv4 and IPv6 connectivity.

How you do this depends on your OS, routing equipment, transit providers, geography, and budget. http://ipv6gate.sixxs.net/ is a starting point for many IPv6 resources. If you really want to support IPv6 on your network you'll need a budget for it, some outside consulting resources, and you may even need to make equipment changes or contract with additional transit providers. It's not a well developed field yet, especially in North America.

The question most people are asking is why support IPv6? The answer seems to be, at present, to not lag behind competitors and to be prepared for future customer needs. How soon will those customer needs materialize? That's anyone's guess. I think it will become a commonplace need in North America within 3 - 5 years. Given that time frame, it makes a lot of sense to make equipment choices that will provide IPv6 support in the future; and it may be prudent to choose transit providers who have a well developed plan for implementing IPv6 or already offer it as a product. However, it's still difficult to make a business case for spending money solely on an IPv6 implementation.

In short, the best advice I have is make sure your engineers are educated on IPv6; or contract with someone who is. Make smart equipment choices now so your gear won't be useless to you when IPv6 does become a customer need. Don't spend a lot of money on implementing IPv6 now unless you see a demand for it, but be prepared for the future.

[Jatos]

Also I suspect if it beocmesm ore favourable to use IPv6, more people will have to support it. I imagine it will prove quite important for IPv6 to make IPv4 obselete as the amount of IPv4 address's that can issued is limited (about 4 billion IP address's to a world of about 6 billion people, especially when computer use more than one IP, is a slight problem when you think it through)

[Juniper Junkie]

Well, IPv4 has been doomed for quite a while now and I'm not sure we'll ever actually get around to killing it. I think 3-5 years is simply a nominal guess that we've been saying since IPv6 hit the scene, and it has yet to materialize. The advent of DHCP, NAT and private IP space really put a dent in the consumption of IP addresses, and until more money is thrown into making every building in the "civilized" world a hive of internet-capable devices(I'm talking toasters, dishwashers, and kitchen sinks), we just don't need IPv6.

Going back to DHCP, NAT and private addressing, when you consider that theoretically, a single IP address can be used by millions of devices, you can see that the IPv4 supply far exceeds the current and (foreseeable) future demand. That, coupled with how entrenched IPv4 is in every aspect of networking from layer 3 through 7, makes IPv4 a big black rectangular monolith that can pretty much take anything we can throw at it. :cool:

The biggest factor in the slow demise of IPv4 is mismanagement of resources. :rolleyes:

[OfF3nSiV3]

how hard it is?
well you need to upgrade the operating systems, the routers and probably the applications
on top of that, you need to keep ipv4 compatibility in the meanwhile

[sanjay]

hi there
as far as i know ipv6 is the latest version of the internet protocol which provides much large name space and is reliable and efficient than the previous version.

[princee18]

Of course IPv6 is good but migrating from IPv4 to IPv6 at an instant is not possible. It can be implemeted node by node using autoconfiguration.

[Maverick]

the advantages of ipv6 over ipv4 are many. You can check out these links for your information. http://www.networkdictionary.com/networking/IPv6vsIPv4.php and http://www.ipv6.org/

[Mak_Arendy]

can someone please tell me if there is a simulation software which supports ipv6?

thank you

[woods01]

It's been 5 years since this question was asked and I don't think anyone can provide any real advantages to go with it.

The websites that are used to market it have $ invested in it's success most of the time so they are going to show things in a positive light.

In 2010 the disadvantages probably outweigh the positives since widespread ipv6 usage is going to result in various styles of attacks that firewalls / brute force protection just aren't prepared for.