Goals and Methods

The most important goal of this book is to show that IPv6 is a mature technology and it is ready for deployment. It goes beyond discussing the basics of the protocol while remaining accessible to those unfamiliar with IPv6. With this book in hand, you will not only understand IPv6 but, most important, will know how to plan, design, and deploy IPv6 services.

Countless books document and explain the vast set of protocols and features known under the name of IPv4. Although its evolutionary nature allows IPv6 to back reference many of its protocols and features, detailing all the changes and improvements made would require more than this book. On the other hand, IPv6 has yet to enter the mainstream and is outpacing many of the reference books on the market. This creates the risk of making any pure deployment case study discussion difficult to follow. These considerations shaped the methodology employed in this book.

The most important changes in the foundation of IP, such as addressing architecture, packet format, and layer 2-to-layer 3 address resolution, are reviewed in detail. All the other protocols and features are discussed in the context of a service such as unicast, multicast, virtual private networks, quality of service, and security. The goal is to provide the reader with the understanding and tools needed to deploy the respective services. This approach gives a practical dimension to the information presented. This knowledge is reinforced in the second part of the book, where the reader can see it applied to concrete, complete deployment case studies. Deployment planning, deployment costs, performance, and IPv4IPv6 coexistence topics are also covered to further anchor the discussion into real-life deployment challenges.

All covered topics are complemented with configuration examples as well as debug outputs wherever useful. The case studies start with a description of the existent IPv4 network environment. They go through planning and design considerations and present in the end configuration of key network elements. You can leverage this knowledge immediately in a real, Cisco IOS-based network infrastructure.

In summary, this book's goals are to:

• Provide relevant, advanced IPv6 information from a deployment perspective.

• Help you plan IPv6 deployments by offering guidelines and references to relevant resources.

• Provide you the opportunity to practice the acquired knowledge on complete case studies.

• Offer deployment examples that can be used as a reference in designing IPv6 services.