The transition to IPv6 is inevitably close, organizations around the world are preparing their systems, operations and procedures in order to be ready when the time comes. Some of them consider IPv6 a must ability for any solution to be integrated in their data centers nowadays.

At Zevenet, IPv6 was a pending subject to face and for that reason, after some source code refactoring and functions logic preparations, mainly in the network interfaces components that we worked on last year, IPv6 support has been a smooth integration ready to be released the next 12th of June with the release of Zevenet EE 5.2 .

The challenge in that matter has been the integration of new tools specialized in IPv6 networking, as an example, the tool vzctl used to send gratuitous ARP packets required to notify that the cluster virtual IPs have switched and they’re active in another node. In regards to the web GUI and API, it has been required to extend the IP address input validations to accept both IPv4 and IPv6 formats.

How can we use IPv6 with Zevenet?

In the upcoming Zevenet EE 5.2 release, all kinds of network interfaces have support for IPv6: NICs, bond interfaces, virtual interfaces, VLANs and floating interfaces. Also, advanced routing for those are fully supported.

Currently, LSLB farms with HTTP/S profile supports both SLB44 (already supported) and SLB66 (load balancing from ipv6 clients to ipv6 backends) and even they can work with combined stacks for virtual IPs and backends, excepting for L4xNAT profile where doesn’t support NAT64 or NAT46 yet. GSLB farms are also ready to work with IPv6 networks.

In regards to the clustering service, it supports virtual interfaces of both stacks to be failover from one node to another taking into account that the cluster interface have to be in IPv4 only.

Other IPv6 cases will be supported in upcoming releases in order to complete the support in every component of the Zevenet solution: security with IPDS, full stateful cluster support, SLB64 and SLB46, dual stack for NICs and local services.

How Zevenet can help us with the IPv6 transition without disruption?

The journey from IPv4 only to IPv6 only will be long and full of challenges to execute the transition smoothly. Although it could exist different cases of required support from IPv4 to IPv6 or vice-versa, the usual path would be: IPv4 only >> NAT46 >> SLB66 >> IPv6 only or even for some cases we can use the shortcut IPv4 only >> SLB46 >> IPv6 only.

With this architecture in mind, there are several options to migrate to IPv6 only without service disruption.

In the current state of the IPv6 support with Zevenet, it’s possible to isolate services from IPv4 and IPv6 and even for HTTP/S services to use dual stack ready servers to serve the application through any of the stacks.

An example of a farm configuration with IPv6 virtual IP is very easy as it’s shown below.

Do you have another use cases and IPv6 challenges to face? Contact us and look forward to the Zevenet EE 5.2 release!