[afnog] The path to eliminating IPv4 in the backbone

[Mark Tinka]

On 2/Oct/17 11:24, Andrew Alston wrote:

>  
>
> I figured I’d drop a note that may be of interest to some of you.
>

Thanks, Andrew, for sharing your experiences.


>  
>
> Effectively though – it is now possible to remove V4 entirely from P
> routers without losing any functionality – providing you engineer it
> right.  So we’re making progress 😊
>

So as you've confirmed again, a number of MPLS-based applications still
do not have native IPv6 support, while they do in IPv4. This issue is
compounded when operators maintain not only equipment from different
vendors, but also different equipment from the same vendor. As if that's
not enough, different software with different levels of feature support
from the same or different vendors, for the same or different equipment.

We, for example, are a triple-vendor network - Cisco, Juniper and
Arista. Fair point, we only use Arista for Layer 2 core switching, so
those boxes do not participate in our MPLS domain. However, we have
different platforms from Cisco and Juniper in operation, each running
their own versions of software that are at different levels of
development re: MPLS applications over IPv6.

Unless one is bound to recover a significant amount of IPv4 space by
converting one's backbone (core, edge, or both) to IPv6-only, I'd only
consider doing MPLSv6 network-wide once there is parity within and
between vendors. I'd probably spend more time delivering working IPv6 to
customers, until that day.

I can imagine the cluster-mess enabling MPLS applications for IPv6-only
that would ensue if anyone tried this with the current state-of-the-art.

Mark.
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