IPv6

Overview

The NFM-P supports IPv6 for control-plane addressing on IPv6-enabled devices.

Although the implementation of IPv6 is driven by the diminishing IPv4 address space, it is increasingly necessary to use a protocol that is designed to handle more complex network applications, such as broadband voice and video transmission, IP transit, Internet exchange peering, and other large enterprise applications.

Transition from IPv4 to IPv6

The transition from IPv4 to IPv6 is occurring in stages as network providers, service providers, and end users migrate existing applications and equipment to the new version. Control-plane forwarding of IPv6 packets is an important part of this transition; it allows isolated IPv6 hosts and smaller IPv6 networks to peer across an IPv4 network, using a mechanism such as 6over4 tunneling.

With 6over4 tunneling, a host encapsulates IPv6 packets in IPv4 packets for transport across an IPv4 network. Routers that identify 6over4 encapsulation remove the IPv4 encapsulation before they forward the packets to other native IPv6 hosts. The 6over4 mechanism uses the IPv4 multicast infrastructure for neighbor discovery.

IPv6 benefits

The general benefits of IPv6 include:

IPv6 support on the NFM-P

The NFM-P entities that support IPv6 configuration include the following:

  • BGP for base routing instances and VPRN services

  • MVPN IPv6 for BGP routing instances

  • MVPN IPv6 for BGP policy statements

  • IS-IS adjacencies

  • multicast routing

  • static routes

  • ICMP

  • routing policies

  • access ingress and egress policies

  • CPM filter policies

  • PPP

  • IES and VPRN SAPs

  • IES and VPRN bidirectional forwarding detection

  • VLL Ipipe

  • PIM-SSM

  • PIMv6 on VPRN routing instances and interfaces

  • MLD under IES and VPRN

An NFM-P operator enables IPv6 on an interface during interface creation.

The benefits of the NFM-P IPv6 implementation include:

Accepted IPv6 address formats

The NFM-P accepts IPv6 addresses in the following formats:

Using a combination of colon-hexadecimal and dotted-decimal formats may be convenient in an environment that supports the use of IPv4 and IPv6 addresses.

The NFM-P allows IPv6 address compression for an address that contains repeated zero values. You can use two adjacent colons to represent any group of repeated zero values in an IPv6 address. For example:

2001:DB8::

expands to

2001:0DB8:0000:0000:0000:0000:0000:0000

It is not necessary to supply the leading zeros for a number in an IPv6 address. For example, 2001:DB8::3C:5 is a valid IPv6 address.