A major part of transitioning from IPv4 to IPv6 includes developing an addressing plan, which involves the following preparations:
For actual migration tasks, see Migrating From an IPv4 Network to an IPv6 Network in Configuring and Managing Network Components in Oracle Solaris 11.3.
Before you configure IPv6, you must obtain a site prefix. The site prefix is used to derive IPv6 addresses for all the nodes in your IPv6 implementation.
Any ISP that supports IPv6 can provide your organization with a 48-bit IPv6 site prefix. If your current ISP only supports IPv4, you can use another ISP for IPv6 support while retaining your current ISP for IPv4 support. In such an instance, you can use one of several workarounds. For more information, see Current ISP Does Not Support IPv6 in Troubleshooting Network Administration Issues in Oracle Solaris 11.3.
If your organization is an ISP, then you obtain site prefixes for your customers from the appropriate Internet registry. For more information, see the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) (http://www.iana.org).
Unless your proposed IPv6 network is entirely new, use your existing IPv4 topology as the basis for the IPv6 numbering scheme.
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 IPv6 Network Topology Scenario 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 IPv6 Network Topology Scenario, suppose Router 1's interface to the DMZ has the IPv4 address 192.0.2.0/27, then you can convert the IPv4 address to hexadecimal, and use the result as the interface ID. The new interface ID would be ::C000:0200
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 provided 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 that are available, 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.
For your IPv6 subnets, begin your numbering scheme by mapping your existing IPv4 subnets into equivalent IPv6 subnets. You can use various online tools to convert IPv4 subnets to their equivalent IPv6 designations.