joshua sahala wrote:
An effective migration path might be: 1) Get a v6 border+transit and/or a v6 capable Linux box+tunnels.
as has been pointed out in another email here, there is no v6 provider offering services in NZ...so the connections will have to be tunneled: this means additional hardware, transit, and colo costs (and decreased performance)
Hardware? Until you really need that sort of capacity, you can go to places overseas and buy (for $x, where x is often 0) v6 tunnel endpoints. When your bandwidth requirements dictate that you need hardware to run your own tunnels to your own routers and peer at international IXs, you're probably in a position to get native v6 transport from your transit provider(s), because there will be enough content flowing over this IPv6 thing that world will be in a place where IPv6 is common enough that transit providers have it out of the lab.
1.5) Don't forget to get to Citylink somehow.
There's native v6 there? With (native) connectivity to the rest of the world? (I don't think so)
There is native v6 at the IXs (APE and WIX, anyway). You can use them to get to other NZ v6 capable hosts. TradeMe is a good example of an NZ host that might get some v6 space one day - they probably need to have a think about how Vista and friend might play if they did that, though.
2) Get your customers (who want them) v6 routers and configs.
You are making some very sweeping assumptions here: namely, that I am an intarwebs provider with customers. Perhaps I am a clueful content provider whose customers are someone else's end users (think YouTube or flickr)
So fortunately, as a content provider, I don't have to come up with the money to provide lots of hardware to anyone except myself... unfortunately, I can't get IPv6 space since I have no end users...DOH!!!
Most large content providers have their own ASNs, which to me suggests that they wouldn't have any problems getting IPv6 space to live on. See below for discussion about transit.
3) Serve up a 6to4 relay to your customers, and have them configure their routers to use it.
see above regarding my "customers"
presuming that I configure all of my content servers to use a 6-to-4 relay, local or remote doesn't really matter, performance is teh suck [tm] - the effective throughput of most tunnel servers/relays is a few-hundred Mbps (at best). This is wholly inadequate for a modern content network.
Why would you configure your large content network to use 6to4? 6to4 is really for people who can't get native transit.. I'd be surprised if YouTube were told "No" to "Can we have native IPv6 please". Of course, YouTube peers at a bunch of IXs, so they can just turn on v6 to those who will listen. Anyway, they're probably not going to turn it on until they have enough v6-eyeballs. So, be first, offer a nearly-solution to your customers, and break out of the chicken+egg, etc.
3.5) Consider doing static tunnels with your publicly allocated IPv6 space from [RIR].
still won't improve performance
I suspect it probably would in some cases, actually. The benefit here is that your customers get non-6to4 addresses, or can use the portable assignments that they have got from [RIR].
4) When your access network can do v6, and you've got it all tested etc. turn it on, and if you didn't assign numbers in step 3.5, do so.
see #2
5) Profit (may not be applicable, but it always seems to come at the end of these type of lists)
well, so far I have spent a lot of money on extra hardware for mediocre performance from a lot of mostly hand-maintained tunnels... so no profit, just a lot of additional CAPEX and OPEX
Perhaps, luckily 1-3 were talking about migration, not end goal, I'm pretty sure most migrations involve extra OPEX, at least. Once you've done 4 ofcourse, you've got native IPv6 to your customers, and you're all migrated and happy. What we're aiming for here is to get your network of mostly end users to have IPv6 connectivity. The YouTubes of the world can v6-ify when they're ready, and all they have to do to get there is to get v6 transport. (Discussed above)
You can do steps 1-3 in less than a day, even a few hours. It doesn't require any knowledge of v6 really, you just need some tunnels to send IPv6 traffic out over (other 6to4 routers will be used for the return path, of course, it'll look just like IPv4:41 traffic to you).
Whilst it is possible to set up a tunnel (or three), perhaps even over existing connectivity, 6-to-4 relays do not have the performance to support more than a moderate amount of traffic. So without native v6 services, I have little/no incentive to even try (ignoring the lack of multihoming).
Sure, luckily we're not talking about pushing large amounts of traffic. If you're a v6-enabled provider of either content or `Internet access' and performance becomes a problem, you can drop in your own 6to4 relay router. Or turn 6to4 relaying on on one, or all, of your routers (ie. no extra hardware). I hope I covered it all, but as I'm in a hurry to go check out apartments I might not have, so let me know and I'll fill in gaps. Cheers, -- Nathan Ward