World IPv6 Day
World IPv6 Day has come and gone. June 8th witnessed the largest availability of web sites ever to be available on the IPv6 protocol. So what happened in retrospect? Well, the consensus is it was a success, as no major issues were reported by the majority of participants, at least publically. To summarize World IPv6 Day:
- 400+ official participants, ~20% left their AAAA records in place
- Millions of unique IPv6 connections hitting IPv6 properties for theday, such as Microsoft, Yahoo, Google and Facebook properties
- IPv6 solutions were stress tested
- Awareness and de-mystifying of IPv6, many new sites bought on-line
- Enthusiastic community support focused in one event to better products, services and awareness
- Goal of enabling IPv6 (versus transition from IPv4 to IPv6) was achieved in many cases
- % of IPv6 clients compared to IPv4 was low, as expected, but varied by considerable % points in different web sites
- “Broken” clients anticipated to have issues continue to decline – ~0.02%
A10 had an interesting stand point for World IPv6 Day. A10 Networks participated as a content provider (incidentally one of the first ADC vendors, along with Cisco, to sign up early on) and also had a more critical role as a provider of IPv6 equipment to a broad range of customers.
For a long time A10 has provided the AX Series appliances for Service Providers to enable IPv6 transition solutions (DS-Lite, NAT64 and more) but the focus for World IPv6 Day was squarely on the front end to many web sites.
Below I’ll cover some notes based on our customers’ experiences, our experience as a participant operating our own web site and finally our observations as a vendor.
Customer feedback and observations
A10 customers who used the AX to front end IPv6 services represented a broad cross section of the Internet community, for example:
- A large US web portal
- A major US news organization
- A number of Web 2.0 and Cloud companies
- DNS providers
- Other content and business web sites
Observations:
- A10 customers utilized a variety of pure IPv6 load balancing and SLB-PT (Server Load Balancing with Protocol Translation). In other words both IPv6 > IPv6 and IPv6 > IPv4
- One large customer, exclusively using A10 ADCs reported well over a million unique IPv6 addresses hitting its infrastructure’s front-end A10 IPv6 VIP, with AX units in multiple data centers and extensive testing prior; no infrastructure major issues were encountered
- The above mentioned customer still reported the IPv6 traffic was a small fraction of its overall traffic (far less than 1%), but was higher than expected
- No customer support calls were generated to the A10 support line on World IPv6 Day related to the AX and IPv6 load balancing
The content provider perspective (operating our own web site)
- One of 53 sites monitored by RIPE for World IPv6 Day from the 400+ participants
- AAAA record turned on to www.a10networks.com a few days before, no issues in testing
- 10x volume on World IPv6 Day, however the numbers were still in the hundreds of connections, not a surprise for a niche site
- No issues reported with A10 site access from users
- AAAA record now left on, one of the ~20%!
- A minor observation: an IPv6 widget showing both IPv4 and IPv6 addresses used to access the A10 web site was not responsive for a portion of the Day (this called back to an external site). Presumably due to the IPv6 traffic volume
The vendor perspective
- A lot of preparation in the weeks and months before by customers meant issues had been addressed prior; World IPv6 Day itself was uneventful
- Unique test bed – one issue found and resolved before World IPv6 Day
- Community provided absolute and detailed description of the issue
- Multiple confirmations in < 24 hours that the patch was successful
- Millions of connections stress testing the AX IPv6 configurations without issue; proving the solutions are production ready
- Provided a large “real world” test bed versus the lab
- Native IPv6 SLB and SLB-PT used, initial expectation was a SLB-PT focus, but both were used extensively
What’s next?
IPv6 week next year? Nothing has been written in stone next, but it was clear awareness and implementation of IPv6 took a great stride forward. On the World IPv6 Day Congress panel A10 participated on in London on June 14th with Google, Yahoo, Limelight and Cisco there was general consensus, it worked and not much happened. Why? Preparation and testing.
If you have not enabled IPv6 yet, let us know and we can help, we are also offering a unique opportunity to see your existing IPv4 website on IPv6 via http://www.a10networks.com/ipv6/ just by signing up!
On a final note, thanks to our development, field SE and support teams for supporting all our customers and getting them ready to be successful on World IPv6 Day.
More information, links and other views
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