Question on IPv6 address for partners

[news2010a]

Hi,

Imagine organization wants to build an extranet MPLS network dedicated to hundreds of partners. Today these partners connect via IPSec tunnel. We want to phase out such IPSec small routers and allow partners to get in via MPLS instead. We are talking about 400 partners.

One of the requirements (or desire) from network team is to advertise different networks (Class B or /32) to each partner.

Question:
Imagine I want to leverage IPv6 for this.

My concern is that some partners may not be prepared to run IPv6 on their routers.

But if I run Dual Stack on my end, I could always grant IPv4 addresses to the ones on IPv4 and still be prepared to advertise IPv6 for the partners that have compatible IPv6 routers. Does my idea make sense?

[Andrew Yourtchenko]

From "pure network" point of view, this approach may be viable. Your network looks like IPv4 network for those with IPv4, and like IPv6 network for those with IPv6. As soon as the partners do not need to communicate between themselves. If they do - then having bidirectional communication between IPv4 and IPv6 clouds might get challenging.

But when we look at it overall, including the services -  there is more questions. How do partners access the services ? They would use your DNS, right ? And this DNS would need to have the entries for both IPv4 and IPv6 services of yours (A and AAAA resource records).

As soon as the DNS has the AAAA records, those of the partners that have other means of IPv6 access but not the tunnels to your network, will try to IPv6 first - and will in the best case fall back to IPv4 - in the worst case the connections will hang. (What IPv6 addresses do you plan to use ? ULA ? or your own address space ? A lot will depend on that)

So, in short, this idea needs a more thorough analysis which will depend on more details of your setup.