[c-nsp] Older gear and IPv6

[Mohacsi Janos]

On Wed, 24 Mar 2010, Charles Mills wrote:

> Doing some research for an IPv6 migration "plan".  It is almost
> inevitable that it will run on older switch gear at some point for the
> sites I'm being tasked with evaluating.
>
> Older Layer 3 gear being what it is I'm already aware does everything
> in software if it supports it at all.
>
> What about older layer 2 gear?  Are there any issues there or is a
> packet just a packet regardless of the address format?  I can't think
> of anything to worry about here unless there are MTU issues.

Layer 2 should not be a problem. There should be no MTU size issues IPv6 
(except that the sender node expecting working path-mtu-discovery along 
the path).

We had a strange layer2? problem at broadband environment. PPP should have 
been transparent, but BRAS dropped IPv6 packets since it was unknown to 
them....


>
> Are any hardware vendors making IPv6 capable gear that does hardware
> switching or are we processed switched for the time being?

If you think about the Cisco, as mailing list suggest, have a look at 
Catalyst 3560-(??) and 3750-(??) series. Also more advanced switches 
(4500, 4900, 6500) are supporting IPv6 hardware forwarding.

Best Regards,
 		Janos Mohacsi