I am presenting at Microsoft TechEd 2014 in Houston, TX

This year is going by too fast! I can't believe Microsoft TechEd is right around the corner. I am excited to be presenting again at the event, this time I am doing:
How IPv6 Impacts Private Cloud Deployments

The abstract for the presentation:

DCIM-B373 How IPv6 Impacts Private Cloud Deployments

Thursday, May 15 2:45 PM - 4:00 PM

Speaker(s): Edward Horley

Track: Datacenter and Infrastructure Management

Session Type: Breakout

Topic: IPv6

This presentation is focused on how IPv6 impacts Microsoft Private Cloud deployments. Topics covered include Hyper-V Network Virtualization (HNV), HNV Gateways, NVGRE, Windows PowerShell configuration for IPv6 addressing, DHCPv6 reservations for client hosts, IPAM integration, and general best practices for deployment. 

 

If you are attending TechEd this year I would love to see you in my session. I will be handing out discount codes for an ebook version of my recent book title Practical IPv6 for Windows Administrators from Apress.

 

See you in Houston!

- Ed

ARIN moves into Phase 4 and is down to their last /8 of IPv4 - it is time for IPv6

It is official, as of today (April 23, 2014) ARIN and by extension North America has run into the final phase of IPv4 address allocations. They are down to their last /8 and therefore the largest allocation now will be a /22 along with showing a use case for transition over to IPv6. If you have no transition plan, you can't even get that last /22.

 You can see more information about Phase 4 at the ARIN press release. This is a huge deal for the Internet community and will likely change some corporate and enterprise adoption plans and thinking in the near future. If you are curious, it looks like Akamai was the big winner with the 104.64.0.0/10 allocation going to them and tipping the inventory level.

So for all of you holding off thinking IPv6 will never impact them, it is time to start planning and figuring out your design and implementation schedules. You will have a bit of time for the service providers to burn through their existing inventory of IPv4 but after that you will have to purchase IPv4 at the going market rate. It makes IPv6 look more and more attractive.

If you want some help getting started in a lab or deploying and you run Windows you might want to pick up my book.

Welcome to a brave new world, I think I need to pick up my "the world is ending" sign and go walk around downtown San Francisco for the day.
- Ed

Post Interop Las Vegas - IPv6 update

Thanks to everyone who attended my IPv6 presentation at Interop. I was pleased with the number of attendees who chose to participate in my session especially being the last timeslot of the day. Many who attended wanted the slides so I am making them available via slideshare. You can also download the PDF from the Interop website (attendees only - requires username and password)

Getting Serious About IPv6: Go Big or Go Home from Edward Horley

If you have more questions please reach out to me via twitter or by email (My name at howfunky.com) and I will do my best to answer any questions around the presentation and about IPv6.
 - Ed

Presenting on IPv6 at InterOp in Las Vegas - April 3, 2014

I was delighted when my colleague Ethan Banks (of PacketPushers fame) asked me to present on IPv6 at InterOp. The presentation audience is a slightly different for me so I have had to change some of my content and get a bit more creative, all good things. The title for my session is:
Getting Serious about IPv6: Go Big or Go Home

It is really focused at Enterprise Network Managers, Directors of IT and CTO types rather then the typical networking nerd that might attend an IPv6 session. I felt it was important to start explaining IPv6 to these professionals so they really understand what is happening in the industry. For the session the key takeaways are:
    Why you need to move to IPv6 for your Enterprise
    The impact to your business of staying on IPv4 only
    What to do next to get started with IPv6 in your Enterprise 

My session is on Thursday, April 3rd at 4pm and the show is in Las Vegas. I encourage you to register for the event not just because I am presenting (though that should be good enough on its own!) but also because of the impressive list of other speakers.

I believe InterOp makes the contents available after the event so I will update the blog when that happens. I hope to see you at my session!
- Ed

Update: apparently InterOp has a really good discount going on right now until March 17th for the show. If you use the discount code 40PERCENT you will get, surprise, 40% off the total access pass. 

Getting your first IPv6 address allocation from ARIN

The American Registry for Internet Numbers or ARIN has put out a great little PDF you can download on how to get started with getting your first IPv6 allocation. For those who have not done this it can be useful to have an outline about what to expect in the process and this provides that.
It is interesting to note that they give the same site to prefix allocation chart as their website which is outlined below:

Number of Sites	Prefix Block Size
1	/48
2-12	/44
13-192	/40
193-3,072	/36
3,072 - 49,152	/32

You can find the details for how this actually works on the ARIN website.

I would expect most enterprises to fit in the /40 to /36 category as ARIN's definition of a site is relatively broad. They did this intentionally and as you can see in the definitions that follow, you can argue your single work from home user would classify as a site.

From ARIN's website:
"6.5.8.2.1. Standard sites
A site is a discrete location that is part of an organization’s network. A campus with multiple buildings may be considered as one or multiple sites, based on the implementation of its network infrastructure. For a campus to be considered as multiple sites, reasonable technical documentation must be submitted describing how the network infrastructure is implemented in a manner equivalent to multiple sites.
An organization may request up to a /48 for each site in its network, and any sites that will be operational within 12 months.

6.5.8.2.2. Extra-large sites
In rare cases, an organization may request more than a /48 for an extra-large site which requires more than 16,384 /64 subnets. In such a case, a detailed subnet plan must be submitted for each extra-large site in an organization’s network. An extra-large site qualifies for the next larger prefix when the total subnet utilization exceeds 25%. Each extra-large site will be counted as an equivalent number of /48 standard sites."

Remember, if you run labs, dev and test networks that might have to simulate an entire site then you need to include each of those as sites and not as a single /64 subnet in your design and request to ARIN. Otherwise you will not have enough address space to build out those test environments that you might require and you will have to go back to request address space.
- Ed