Thursday, February 17, 2011

IPv6 tunnel mode licensing in Cisco IOS

As part of the out reach I am trying to do on behalf of the CAv6TF a couple of friends and I set up the wired/wireless network for the Security B-Sides SF event which happened Feb 14-15 at the Zeum in San Francisco, CA. It was a lot of fun helping out and hopefully people who attended found it useful and perhaps interesting that they were getting IPv6 in addition to IPv4.

One of the items I noticed when setting up the IPv6 tunnel service to Hurricane Electric was that in the IP Base license the command to get the tunnel working was NOT available. Specifically you could not do:
tunnel mode ipv6ip

I had to change the license on the routing platform to include the "Data" license. This is on a newer Cisco IOS devices running 15.1(3)T code release. Granted the license showed a lifetime of some crazy number of years but I still don't understand why this feature would NOT be included in IP Base license. Given the fact that transition to IPv6 is going to become more and more important for everyone I find it surprising Cisco did this. It will make tunneling IPv6 across IPv4 only service networks a lot harder. Perhaps the plan is to recommend only have a single public tunnel endpoint and use IPv6 DMVPN instead? I'm not sure what the logic is but I will ask someone in the Cisco channel team and see if they know. Yet another annoying reason I had to reload the router.
- Ed

1 comment:

Nathan Neulinger said...

At least you were able to get it configured... I just found out that Cisco Nexus 7000 devices don't suppot IPv6 tunnels AT ALL - was in the middle of trying to move a tunnel from an external linux router onto the nexus and it won't even allow setting a v6 address on the tunnel interface.

How irritating.