IPv6 Address Planning: Designing an Address Plan for the Future

by Tom Coffeen

With the recent exhaustion of IPv4 in North America, Asia, and Europe, and Latin America it's official: IPv4 is on life-support and is rapidly on its way to becoming a legacy protocol. Meanwhile, IPv6 adoption is surging. More than half of the traffic on the nation's largest mobile network is over IPv6 while a social networking giant plans to no longer use IPv4 internally within 18 months. No matter where you work, as a networking professional, IPv6 adoption is in your future.

Along with that adoption comes the need for an IPv6 address plan. This guide provides a comprehensive overview of how to create one. In three sections--preparation, design, and maintenance--enterprise IT network architects, engineers, and administrators will learn the current best-practices for designing, deploying, and maintaining an effective IPv6 addressing plan.

Genres: Technical

286 pages, Paperback

First published November 1, 2014

Reviews

[Rodrigo Monteiro · Rating 4 out of 5]

Good book focused on getting away with legacy IP (IPv4) thinking, recommendations based on author's experience on a large ISP and some related IPv6 related technologies such as DNS, DHCP, dynamic routing, IPAM, etc...

It won't touch too much technical or how to do configurations as it would be a vendors guide, instead you get to learn how to proper plan address for sites on all sizes and how to decide what is a site to you (i.e. geographical region, country, worldwide), how to divide network addressing based on organisation needs or structure to be able to scale growth while allowing optimisation of prefix aggregation to keep manageable routing tables. You will get to hear a lot ditching legacy style allocation as this shouldn't be an issue in IPv6, and focus on nibble boundaries and network functions.

This is not a beginner's book on IPv6, but a reference to better plan and deploy once one has background information on how headers, ND and configuration works, but a very good complementary learning once you grasp the foundations of next generation IP.

[YaMan · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was my 2nd book on ipv6 (after IPv6 Essentials) and it was much easier to read. The Author did not go into so much detail about packet fields and processes going on in ipv6 operation, so it seems that these books should be read in reverse order. After finishing both, I feel more at home in the (for me) new protocol. Tom Coffeen's book was also more practical with proposed address plans and tactics to split up assigned space (and also procedures required to get that space). The language of the book was more fresh and even funny sometimes. Good book, I recommend it.

[Nathan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great IPv6 subnetting guide

This book certainly helped me become more familiar and comfortable with IPv6 and subnetting. Tom clearly knows his stuff and has a decent, yet mild sense of humor throughout the book.

[Sam · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a great book, especially about dispensing with IPv4 thinking as you roll out IPv6.

[Luke Wang · Rating 3 out of 5]

only part of the chapters are new to me