This is the first in what will no doubt be a many part series on deploying IPv6. This is a problem I have had to overcome recently, and still to this day I battle with the implementation subtleties. If you find yourself in my shoes, I hope you find this helpful.

So, firstly, you need to consider your architecture. Mine, I am reliably told is totally wrong.

I use ASAs as routers in the campus. Why? Cos shut up - that’s why! I like to maintain user group segmentation, and I also like to maintain security policy quite tightly. Therefore I put all users in VLANs managed by 802.1x, and all those VLANs gateway on an ASA trunk subinterface. I then provide an appropriately sized routed L3 subnets from a site specific IPv4 /21 and have ACLs as access-groups. Voila - policy is maintained at the gateway border.

To those of you who do it in transparent mode, and/or use Layer 3 Switching with ACLs, I salute you. This works for me tho ;)

The quickest way to get you from nothing to something in IPv6 world is to take on board the following:

  • You should totally forget subnet sizing for any campus deployment. Your networks will get a /64 allocated from a site specific /48.
  • You should use Stateless Automatic Address Configuration (SLAAC), in conjunction with static addressing.
  • You should make sure your DNS infrastructure is configured for auto registration and crucially from trusted devices only.
  • You should have strongly considered your firewalling policy.

The last point there is the key one. IPv6 is not designed for NAT. Therefore, you cannot rely on NAT/PAT as a way of masquerading your hosts from prying eyes. Remember, you are only ever a few milliseconds away from every bad guy on the internet these days!

So, back to the ASA. For me, the most logical thing was to put /64 prefixes onto the existing VLAN sub-interfaces alongside my IPv4 /26s. This effectively Dual Stacks my ASA, and allows the end device to deterministically select the most appropriate path.

Note that unless otherwise instructed, most application stacks will attempt IPv6 DNS lookups, and therefore prefer IPv6 communication when available. Java is the only notable exception I can think of.

Assigning IPv6 to an interface is dead easy. Assume we have 2aaa:2bbb:2ccc::/48 as our site prefix.

interface Port-channel2.100
  vlan 100
  nameif MGMT
  security-level 100
  ip address 10.0.0.1 255.255.255.192 standby 10.0.0.2
  ipv6 address 2aaa:2bbb:2ccc:100::1/64
  ipv6 address fe80::fac2:88ff:feac:d2e5 link-local standby fe80::fac2:88ff:feac:d4e5
  ipv6 enable
  ipv6 nd prefix 2aaa:2bbb:2ccc:100::/64 86400 86400

Lets look at that for a moment. I will ignore the standard interface stuff - port channels are optional as is the failover config

  • First we assign our Global IPv6 address to the interface. This is the publicly routable address.
  • Next, we need our unique link-local addresses. This will be explained shortly.
  • This third line turns IPv6 on for the interface
  • Finally, we set up SLAAC neighbour discovery on this L2 VLAN, letting other endpoints know that we are a router for this prefix. Think of it as a one liner for essential DHCP style network address distribution.

Next, we need a route.