Designing Small D/D Network with IPv6 Support

[Matthew Butt]

Hi All,

We are in the process of exploring suitable hardware for our new data centre facility and if possible I would like to pick your brains about the HP range of switches.

In short, we have an HP 5400ZL Core Switch at the centre of our network, that has dual stack capability for IPv4 and IPv6 - naturally this is Layer 3 switch with pretty hefty availability in terms of redundant power, hot swap modules etc. At the edge we would like to deploy 48 port switches, they don't need more then 100Mbps ports but ideally with 1Gbps copper uplinks but from my research it seems there are virtually no affordable edge switches from HP that support this in conjunction with IPv6.

Now I am not all that familiar with IPv6, but I am trying to find out if there are any HP devices that will do what we need them to in terms of offering the ability to have both IPv4 and IPv6 available at the rack level? I may be best consulting a professional in regards to the nitty gritty design of our network especially with routing and vLAN's etc but a broad answer and advice would be much appreciated.

Thanks in advance,

Matthew

[Jeff Carrell · Accepted solution]

A comment on the 5400. It does IPv6 up to static routing (stateless, stateful, static, local [vlan] routing, dual-stack).

If you need IPv6 dynamic routing (Ripv3, OSPFv6) or if you need DHCPv6, you'll need the premium license.

You will also want the latest code K.15.04.0003! (especially for DHCPv6)

Now, the E3500 (not E3500G-yl) is available in 24 or 48 10/100 with 4 dual personality/ 10/100/1000 ports :-) This are way more affordable the the full Gig E3500 series. (that's why HP came out with them ;-)

Both those family of switches run exact same image, actually 3500, 5400, 6200, 6600, 8200 all do!

Also, 2520 family supports IPv6 like I explained above, but these switches have only 8 or 24 ports (actually one version of the 24 port switch has 28 ports total). I haven't looked at any of the other mid-tier L2 switches to see what does/does not support IPv6.

I have all of these switches in my lab, and have been playing with IPv6 and HP-ProCurve, HP-3Com/H3C, and Cisco switches/routers for over a year. All works great....but lots of little caveats between networking gear, network connected devices, client OS's, etc...

hth...Jeff

[Jeff Carrell]

Let me clarify something, the 2520 series does IPv6 up to static routing (stateless, stateful, static, local [vlan] routing, dual-stack).

I wasn't as clear on that (they don't do IPv6 dynamic routing.

Cheers...Jeff

[Matthew Butt]

Hi Jeff,

You are a star, thank you for your replies and advice, really appreciated.

Static routing is fine for what we need, I just wasn't sure if we could use our current HP 2610-48 switches despite trying to achieve the ability to run both IPv4 and IPv6 protocols.

I will look into the standard E3500 switches and see where they fit in price wise. On a slight tangent, do you personally offer a network design service as I would ideally like to run through my ideas for the new D/C with a professional before pursuing much further. Naturally I would pay you for your time on this.

Thanks again for all your help and I look forward to hearing back from you.
Kind regards,

Matthew