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Comment by sargun | Hacker News Reader

Our new DC are all IPv6 enabled (we started launching them in December) with dual stack, and preference for IPv6. Only 1 of the DCs are online so far, and we're already pushing around something like 3 Gb/s of traffic over V6. It was nice how many things just magically worked atop V6, once we added AAAA records.

One thing that was sad though, is how poorly everything built atop, and around Ruby worked.

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Do you run virtualization in your DC? If you do, is IPv6 only inside VM context or you also use it as a transport (i.e. switches see IPv6 packets)?

Yes. IPv6 all over. Actually, we're looking at deprecating IPv6 at the transport layer entirely, and moving to IPv4 in IPv6 over GRE tunnels, but that's largely reliant on having RFC5549 in a few specific places (the edge terms).

Don't you mean deprecating IPv4 then?

What's the benefit of using IPv6 as transport (as opposed to using IPv4 as transport)?

One of the big wins you get with IPv6 is that is doesn't allow fragmenting.

This means packets will be dropped but that's not a bad thing when you have other layers taking care of retransmission. So routers then don't have to spend a lot of time chopping packets up and can just either shift packets faster or drop them telling the sender to slow down.

The other advantage I hope we see enabled is multicast. All these streaming services could massively reduce their bandwidth usage if the Internet allowed multicasts.

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