In this section we begin by describing the systems components in this scenario of a large “departmental” network (1,500+ users with around 1,000 hosts) that wishes to transition to support IPv6. We describe the elements that need to be considered for the transition.

Southampton has been running IPv6 since 1996, but has only in the last two years adopted IPv6 as a production service in its network.

This scenario assumes no IPv6 is deployed beforehand, although in reality the transition at Southampton is already underway, in fact it is at the time of writing in a reasonably advanced stage. Thus after a review of the systems components, we present an overview of the status to date, current plans and next steps, and also the major remaining obstacles that have been identified.

Our motivation to deploy was in support of teaching, research projects, and communication with IPv6 networks (including those used by overseas students), while also encouraging innovation from staff and students – indeed already we have seen new streamed radio (Surge/Virgin1) and multicast video services (ECS-TV2) emerge.

This work has contributed to the IETF v6ops WG enterprise scenario descriptions and analysis. We have documented our campus experience in an Internet Draft [Cho04a] and also documented the IEEE 802.1q VLAN approach to introducing IPv6 [Cho04b] that has also been used at Muenster (see above). The [Cho04a] draft was built from a similar analysis as appears here.