Y’know, I really wanted to throw myself into IPv6 this year; then I went and got distracted by a large-scale VMware deployment (hence the lack of posting over the last…three months). We’re a three-person shop at $dayJob these days, supporting 700+ users across 20+ different countries, and that’s regrettably meant that the things that aren’t required RIGHT NOW get pushed off to the side.
Now that I’m finally finishing that up and comfortable enough with my giant NetApp storage array that I can go without looking at it for a few days, I’m starting to look back into IPv6 again.
I’ve some familiarity with the way the header looks and some basic deployment scenarios — but mostly just those acquired from my CCNP studies of old. Having gone through months of NANOG archives and found disagreement all over the ISP community with respect to the best way(s) to deploy IPv6, I’m even more intimidated.
(That said, I’ve done a paint-by-numbers deployment of IPv6 over MPLS VPN with some Cisco 3800-series routers we snagged from a decommissioned branch to bring some of my BGP/MPLS studies together; that was a ton of fun) 
I’ve been prepping for it for a while, though, in terms of all my new hardware acquisitions. Anyone pushing something that wasn’t v6-aware right NOW has been shown the door since 2007, so I’m just about ready to go dual-stack across the enterprise (though few if any of my ISP’s are ready to support this deployment). Going to be one of those things where I’ll just have to take the documentation and start pushing it out and breaking it to see what works and what doesn’t.
But the most frightening thing of all is the sheer size of the address space. Jesus Christ, it’s big. Like, really big. Big enough that I completely forgot how subnetting worked in the first place. 32-bit dotted-decimal was easy to wrap one’s head around; hard to find anyone who’s been doing this for a while who doesn’t have a few hundred critical infrastructure/server addresses committed to memory — safe to say those days are gone.
Think of all the pages wasted on teaching those new to networking how to properly subnet in order to efficiently provision what was once a scarce resource, and how those practices are still being taught without a really big caveat: “Oh by the way, you don’t really have to know this anymore; the value of these pages is going to plummet in the next five years, and here’s why…”
For a lot of people, it’s going to be the first large technical revolution they’ve had to face. IP hasn’t changed in over three decades; new features were merely layered on top of a fully functional protocol on demand. But now everything that uses that fundamental protocol has to change; the magnitude of this project is enormous and IT departments who haven’t yet begun planning are years behind the curve (and this is a lot of IT departments, by my anecdotal measure).
I look around at the people who’ve been doing this stuff for years; they’d probably hoped to not have to face this before retirement, but that’s not going to be the case. How does one best go about convincing them that not only is a an IPv6 /64 a completely valid way to address a point-to-point link[1], but a way that’s encouraged over the old practice of allocating an IPv4 /30 (or in the case of IPv6, a /127)?
There’s going to be a lot of money to be had in the IPv6-migration consulting business.
[1]: http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-palet-v6ops-point2point-01
