IP version 6

for
Network Management

White Paper

T. Mohamed Asraf Ali

Head – Network & Services Engineering
Sify Technologies Limited
asraf.ali@sifycorp.com

IPv6 for Network Management Sify Technologies - Public

Introduction
It is a known fact today that IPv6 is there to help IPv4 address depletion problem
in the global Internet. Roughly every one of the 6.5 billion humans living on the earth
today can have one IPv6 address each to use. This abundance in the number of address
are not just marketing gimmicks, rather it has its own sweet spots in the network
engineering and life cycle management processes. This paper will focus on IPv6 and its
application in the area of Network Management.

Network Management

Network management based on IP with protocols such as SNMP, RMON, NTP

and Syslog helps consolidate the effort and the human resources involved in the life
cycle management of network and its devices. Majority of the administrative jobs could
be fulfilled remotely using human resources at varied levels of expertise attending to
corresponding levels of tasks. With the IT industry focusing on Consolidation and
Optimization at all levels, the Managed Services Service Providers (MSSP) has the
market opened up for business even in the tougher times of economy, and it is still
expected to grow.

Challenges with IPv4

Managed Services Service Providers deploy Operations Support Systems (OSS) to

offer remote life cycle management services including Fault, Capacity, Accounting,
Performance and Security (FCAPS) Management. There is a continuous flow of control
and management traffic between NOC OSS tools and the managed devices for a real-
time proactive monitoring and management. For such an environment, Managed
Services NOC (MSNOC) architecture should support the following mandatory
characteristics,

All the end-points under the management control of MSNOC should be

carrying a unique management IP address within and between all the
customer domains.

All MSNOC operator Computers should be part of a unique routable (within

the managed customer domains) IP subnet.

These characteristics enable multi-tenancy for MSNOC to handle multiple customer

domains with duplicate IP networks. MSNOC during the process of transition should
assign the unique management IP address routable within MSNOC environment per
managed device.

IPv6 for Network Management Sify Technologies - Public

 Architecture depicting MSNOC control/management traffic flow

NOC - OSS Managed

Services
NMS EMS AAA NTP Syslog NOC

CUST-A

CUST-B

CUST-C

CUST-D

OSS control/management traffic flow

NOC Operator administration traffic flow

With limited number of IPv4 addresses such design characteristics cannot be maintained
beyond certain number of devices. Even the RFC 1918 private IP address space does not
help as the customer networks are mostly deployed with them. Handling duplicates of
such subnets within and between customer domains from the MSNOC perspective
becomes a major bottleneck.

IPv6 addressing for Network Management

To address this challenge consider IPv6 addressing for Management Plane. It will
simply solve, if the MSNOC tools and the devices being managed are made to be IPv6
compliant for management. There are enough IPv6 addresses available globally and the
share every Service Provider gets from Regional Internet Registries are large enough to
address the challenges discussed for the foreseeable future.

We at Sify Technologies, part of our experimentation for 6Choice project, did an

experiment to test the above solution with the tools available in the market. It is
observed that all the necessary services such as AAA, Syslog, NTP, NMS SNMP Poller and
SNMP trap receiver support dual-stack (simultaneous IPv4 and IPv6 stack) operation in
general.

IPv6 for Network Management Sify Technologies - Public

List of products used in the experiments

S.no System Function Products tested

1 NMS (Fault/Security management) Log Receiver Syslog watcher
2 RADIUS Server Authentication Control System Steel-Belt Radius
3 Network Time Server NTP (GPS) Tekhron; Symmetricom
4 NMS (Fault management) SNMP Trap Receiver Ireasoning MIB Browser
5 NMS (Performance Management) SNMP Poller Solarwinds
6 MSNOC Computers Agent PC Windows Vista
7 MSNOC Network Hardware Routers, Switches and Firewalls Cisco Systems; Fortinet

The experiment covered all the systems and the tasks executed by the MSNOC agent for
a complete lifecycle management services per ITIL framework. With IPv6 as the only IP
addressing at the network layer, it was successfully tested.

Sify’s systems for Infrastructure Management Services are in the process of migrating to
an environment supporting dual-stack in order to use IPv6 in its management plane.
Though it is the best option to use, a pure IPv6 based environment is far from being a
reality, as such environments of Service Provider are always expected to be downward
compatible.

The Purpose of the experiment discussed in this white paper is to create awareness of
an application for Service Provider community on IPv6 addressing ready-to-use, well
within the scope of their operations. It is expected to help promote adoption of IPv6 in
the Industry. Service Providers may choose to enable dual-stack support on their OSS
platforms used for Managed Services or upgrade to one that has the support of-the-
shelf.

IPv6 for Network Management Sify Technologies - Public