[afripv6-discuss] IPv6 rollout…

[Andrew Alston]

Hi Guys,

So, while i'll be sending out a lot more data soon, with a lot more information on exactly what we did and how we did it etc, I thought  I would share some news that I for one found rather exciting.

Yesterday evening starting at around 7pm one of the South African universities turned up IPv6, in a fairly consistent manner.  Now, I'm not talking about turning up IPv6 on a few servers, I'm talking about integrating it into every part of their network.  By 2:30am this morning it was running on all their proxy servers, all their residence networks, the wireless networks, all the lab PC's and a good portion of the staff network.  The topology used was identical to that of the IPv4, and as the rest of the network is migrated to the new IPv4 topology V6 will be implemented on everything in dual stack along side that as well.

Now, here is where things get interesting, another network dual stacked is no real news, so lets talk about traffic levels.

The University in question is now running anywhere between 30 to 50 percent of its internet traffic on IPv6, and its working flawlessly so far.  So flawlessly infact that even with Apple's default implementation of Happy Eyeballs that tests RTT and defaults to v4 if the v6 latency is higher, the apples we tested on running lion and mountain lion were still choosing ipv6 most of the time.

I am not going to say this little rollout has been easy though, we had to rearchitecture the entire network (that had to happen anyway for various reasons), and we added the v6 as part of that project.  It would not have been possible to do that without first getting our hands on another /15 worth of IPv4 space though to allow that rearchitecturing to happen properly.

As I said though, in coming days we'll write up what we did with a lot more detail and send through some graphs and other information, I just had to share the fact that we're seeing at points half the traffic on a standard university coming in from the internet over ipv6!

Thanks

Andrew Alston
Network Consultant