Which NIC can support for IPv6

[chuckk281]

YongHee had an IPv6 question:

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Hello,

Is there any reference document or guideline which NIC can support for IPv6?

Quickspecs of latest NIC mention supportability for IPv6 but old NIC’s Quickspecs does not mention it. As far as I know some of old NIC can support IPv6 also.

Can you please advise on it?

HP NC373T PCI Express Multifunction Gigabit Server Adapter

Besides its multifunction capabilities, the NC373T ships with all the advanced server features that ProLiant customers have come to expect, such as support for failover and load balancing, Pre-Boot Execution Environment (PXE), large send offload capability, multiple VLAN tagging, auto-negotiated 10/100/1000Mbps Ethernet speeds and IPv6 packet transmit and receive support (excluding all offload capabilities).

HP NC522SFP Dual Port 10GbE Server Adapter

Technical Specifications

Compliance

FCC Class A, VCCI Class A, BSMI Class A, CISPR 22 Class A, ACA Class A, EN55022 Class A, EN55024-1, ICES-003 Class A, MIC Class A

Other

PCIe v2.0

RoHS compliance 6 of 6

IPv4, IPv6

HP NC382m Dual Port 1GbE Multifunction BL-c Adapter

At A Glance

Interrupt coalescence and dual address cycles (DAC)

Wake-on-LAN (WOL) and pre-boot execution environment (PXE)

IPv6 packet transmit and receive (excluding all offload capabilities); IPv6 aware SNMPv1 agent for Windows

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Vincent and Eirik responded:

Eirik first replied: 

The Ipv6 would also be limited to the OS installed, if it has support (most do, only ones that come to mind that don’t are Windows 2003 out of box and older).

I was not aware that ipv6 required hardware support of any kind (except for obviously TCP offload capabilities as you have quoted below).

Then Vincent also chimed in: 

It does not. Any NIC can transmit and receive IPv6 packets, it doesn’t even know what it’s carrying.

You’d need special NIC support for protocol offloading indeed, but then I’d ask if you really need that and why.

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Other coments or suggestions? Do you use IPv6 in your datacenter?