Since our last update to the IPv6 blog we have spent time planning and getting our heads around IPv6 addressing and subnetting. This has been a steep learning curve; learning to count in hexadecimal was certainly a challenge!

The first step on the road to implementing IPv6 in our network was to develop an addressing plan and decide how we would break up our /32 allocation which we received from RIPE. We have decided to break this down to give us a block of addresses for all of our needs then allocating the rest of the range to each of our datacentre customers. Our plan will be to allocate a /48 subnet (18 quintillion addresses) to each customer.

Our next step was then to rollout IPv6 to our core network and then setup IPv6 peering with our transit providers to give us an IPv6 Internet routing table.

This is where things started to get interesting. We then connected a laptop to the network and gave it an IPv6 address and used a public IPv6 DNS server to test internet connectivity. We successfully managed to browse to some popular websites, google, facebook, hurricane electric, etc.

Now we have proved IPv6 connectivity we are now beginning the process of rolling out IPv6 connectivity to our Customer facing edge switches. Once this is complete we will be in a position to allocate addressing to our customers.

I plan to update this blog as the rollout progresses to keep everyone informed of our progress.