Creating an IPv6 Addressing Plan for Nodes

For most hosts, stateless autoconfiguration of IPv6 addresses for their interfaces is an appropriate, time saving strategy. When the host receives the site prefix from the nearest router, Neighbor Discovery automatically generates IPv6 addresses for each interface on the host.

Servers need to have stable IPv6 addresses. If you do not manually configure a server's IPv6 addresses, a new IPv6 address is autoconfigured whenever a NIC card is replaced on the server. Keep the following tips in mind when you create addresses for servers:

• Give servers meaningful and stable interface IDs. One strategy is to use a sequential numbering scheme for interface IDs. For example, the internal interface of the LDAP server in Figure 4–1 might become 2001:db8:3c4d:2::2.

• Alternatively, if you do not regularly renumber your IPv4 network, consider using the existing IPv4 addresses of the routers and servers as their interface IDs. In Figure 4–1, suppose Router 1's interface to the DMZ has the IPv4 address 123.456.789.111. You can convert the IPv4 address to hexadecimal and use the result as the interface ID. The new interface ID would be ::7bc8:156F.

  Only use this approach if you own the registered IPv4 address, rather than having obtained the address from an ISP. If you use an IPv4 address that was given to you by an ISP, you create a dependency that would create problems if you change ISPs.

Due to the limited number of IPv4 addresses, in the past a network designer had to consider where to use global, registered addresses and private, RFC 1918 addresses. However, the notion of global and private IPv4 addresses does not apply to IPv6 addresses. You can use global unicast addresses, which include the site prefix, on all links of the network, including the public DMZ.