Programming Tutorials

Migration from IPV4 to IPV6

By: William Alexander in Trends Tutorials on 2011-04-13  

For Migration from IP4 to IPV6 there will be a few considerations:

Enabling IPV6 at OS Level

All new OS starting from Windows XP, Mac OS, Linux, Solaris etc,, already has inbuilt IPV6 support. But this may not be enabled by default. During the migration process you will have to enable and ensure it is enabled in each of your servers.

For eg. You can open a DOS window in your laptop now and issue this following command. 'netsh interface ipv6 install' C:\Documents and Settings\william>netsh interface ipv6 install

You will see 'OK' after some time. This means that you just enabled IPV6 support in your PC. you will have to do something similar in all your servers as a first step.

Enabling IPV6 at Application Level

Enabling at the OS level is not enough. you also need to enable IPV6 support on individual applications. For example, if you take a single web application, you are probably using the following applications. MySQL Database, Tomcat Server and standalone scheduler. In this case, the MySQL server must support IPV6 as well because, the tomcat server will have to connect to the MySQL server using IPV6 instead of V4. So each of the applications running in your servers must also be checked and upgraded to a version that supports IPV6.

Therefore, you have to have a list of all these applications and individually make sure they support IPV6.

Enabling IPV6 at network equipments

The major change however is in the networking equiment such as Routers and firewalls. you have to upgrade to routers and firewalls that support IPV6. Some of the neyour ones may already have support but needs enabling and configuring.

Transition:

For migration itself, there are transition technologies whereby you can just add an edge device before our router (eg. 6 to 4) which will do the translation and your network is unchanged and still has IPV4 settings. Another transition mechanism is using tunnelling. This can be used during the transition but eventually you will have to migrate totally.