Address Planning for Customers
- Enterprise Customers: Consider before distributing IPv6 address blocks to clients and decide whether to aggregate them by range. To easily manage traffic per region, it might make sense to assign a /40 to each region. Corporate Banking and Enterprise customers can often get a /48 to access over 65,000 subnets. For very small consumers, some carriers allocate small blocks like /52s, /56s, or /60s. However, to give end users the freedom to assign /64s as they grow, we do not recommend assigning prefixes below /60.
- WAN link: Reserve a /48 block for customer WAN circuits for monitoring purposes. Don’t be confused with infrastructure point-to-point links. Again, it’s good practice to put /64 in your links but really use /127. As with any infrastructure connection, these should be routed through an IGP and aggregated at a gateway or POP router.
- Broadband Customers: Depending on your setup, IPv6 address blocks can be assigned to broadband subscribers. For example, SLAAC can be used to assign her WAN address from her BRAS /64 on the CPE WAN side (Stateless Address AutoConfiguration).
We recommend that you assign at least a /40 to your broadband network and a /48 to your BRAS so that you can advertise these prefixes via BGP. - Data Center Services: Continue to assign loopback and point-to-point connection addresses to data centers through infrastructure blocks. For hosting services, another block must be named (for example, /40). Of course, how you divide these depend on your data center design. Different /64s and VLANs can be configured for each service or customer. Datacenter border routers use IBGP to advertise these subnets to other networks. Traffic Regulation Assign customer prefixes (pulling traffic from both ends of the address space) so that incoming traffic can be balanced. You can easily achieve this by allocating a child aggregate block, like /33.
What is IPv6 Address Planning?
Prerequisites: Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6) and what is IPv6?
A new IP protocol, called Internet Protocol (IP) version 6, is intended to replace IP version 4, which is currently in use and deployed worldwide. The latest IP version, IPv4, has proven to be reliable, easy to implement, and easy to use. It is interoperable and has passed the tests that make the internet a real global utility. However, the original design of IPv4 did not consider the following situations:
- Requirements for IP-level security.
- The rapid expansion of the internet and depletion of IPv4 address space.
- Need for easier auto-configuration and renumbering of network devices.
- Requirements for real-time data delivery also called quality of service.
With the help of methods such as Network Address Translation and private address spaces, IPv4’s life has been extended (NAT). While these methods appear to extend the address space and accommodate traditional client/server configurations, they do not meet the demands of increasing IP addresses. IP address translation, pooling, and temporary assignment techniques cannot be used to connect to always-on environments (such as private internet via broadband, cable modem, or DSL). Additionally, plug-and-play requirements for consumer Internet devices are in addition to address requirements. The IPv6 address space offers more addresses but should be used with caution. You can successfully deploy IPv6 using your existing IPv4 infrastructure. Converting from IP version 4 to IP version 6 is still possible today with proper planning and design.
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