v6ops Working Group E. Vyncke
Internet-Draft G. Van de Velde
Intended status: Informational Cisco Systems
Expires: September 9, 2009 March 8, 2009
IPv6 Deployment and Statistics at a Conference
<draft-vyncke-vdv-v6ops-conf-stats-01.txt>
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Abstract
During the Cisco [Cisco] European networkers Conference 2009 that ran
from 26th to 29th January in Barcelona native IPv6 was added to the
traditional IPv4 infrastructure. During this conference the 3500
attendees had dual stack access to both IPv4 and IPv6 simultaneously.
The goal of this IPv6 deployment project was to gather usage
statistics in a situation where the end-user just wants to access
his/her enterprise VPN or simply get onto the Internet. The
collected statistics are not only useful per se but this document
presents easy ways to measure the quality of the IPv6 connectivity
offered on such events. In essence the users were not conducting
IPv6 technology tests, but were just using Internet services. The
statistics collected give some pieces of information on the size and
impact of IPv6 onto the normal userbase and will also derive the
importance of IPv6 onto the infrastructiure and end-user operating
systems and firewall technologies. The experiment ran in
collaboration with Google [Google] and Tata-Communications [Tata].
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Table of Contents
1. Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
2. Conference Topology Summary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
3. Testing Steps and Procedure . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
4. Statistics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
4.1. Round-Trip Time . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
4.2. Stats for IPv6 Traffic to the Internet . . . . . . . . . . 6
4.3. IPv6 DHCP Clients . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
4.4. IPv6 Neighbours . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
4.5. DNS Requests . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
4.6. Web Server Access . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
4.7. Netflow Information . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
4.8. Security . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
5. Areas for Improvements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
6. IANA Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
7. Security Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
8. Acknowledgements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
9. References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
9.1. Normative References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
9.2. Informative References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
Authors' Addresses . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
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1. Introduction
Traditionally there is at this conference in Europe about 3500
attendees. The nature of the attendees is technical with a heavy
focus on networkes and 90% will have a laptop but will not use them
all the time (lack of time and lack of electrical power). The main
elements the attendees expect from the network infrastructure is that
its stable and easy accessible. The attendees use the network
Infrastructure to access their enterprise network via a VPN and
Internet content (hotels, restaurants, email, etc..).
During the conference, about 10% of the users were made aware at the
IPv6 session slots that IPv6 connectivity was available in native
dual stack, however, the vast majority did not make special efforts
to run IPv6 or even enable IPv6 on their end-user PC's.
The experiment was run in three steps: (1) Networkers infrastructure
was enabled for dual stack, (2) The local DNS server was white-listed
by Google as content provider to give AAAA records for Google content
and (3) the Router Advertisements were set to ask the users to use
DHCPv6 for address configuration (M-flag) instead of IPv6 Stateless
Address Autoconfiguration (SLAAC). Each of the steps was run with a
lenght of 24 hours.
This paper gives a summary insight in the statistics and the topology
used for the IPv6 connectivity during each step. It also reports
that everything kept working as expected and that the end-users were
not aware they were using IPv6 as a foundation communication protocol
in addition to IPv4: it was completely transparent for them.
2. Conference Topology Summary
The Network infrastructure at Cisco European Networkers conference is
deployed in a four-storey building. For each floor has a dedicated
routed IPv4 subnet available with a dedicated number of RFC 1918 IPv4
addresses. These addresses are translated at the edge of the network
from private into a public address by a Network Address Translator.
The wireless Access Points do also have smart services installed
including end-system security (captive portal) and inter-AP roaming
capability.
For the IPv6 infrastructure, it was selected to create a single
Layer-2 domain for the full Networkers conference spanning all 4
floors. In contrast, the number of stations per floor is not an
issue with an IPv6 /64 subnet. This made the IPv6 deployment more
simpler, eventhough it was needed to add some Ethernet protocol type
filtering in place at the layer 2 of the OSI layer to separate IPv4
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from IPv6: on the same topology (4 wireless LAN), there was both a 4
IPv4 subnets and a single IPv6 subnet.
At the edge of network, an IPv6 router provided IPv6 connectivity
through an IPv6-in-IPv4 tunnel to Tata Communication POP in Paris.
Note: initially we were planning for a real native dual-stack
connectivity over the local loop, but it appeared a too costly option
when only a very small incremental budget is available (like almost 0
USD incremental cost). It was because of the kind sponsorship of
Tata Communications that IPv6 was made available at zero incremental
cost involved towards the conference leadership.
To gather statistics from the deployment Netflow v9 and SNMP were
used as well as regular shell access to network equipments. For the
management, an old laptop was used running a Linux distribution. The
statistics and traffic data from the event can be found
http://www.cisconetworkers6.com/. A graphical representation of the
topology can be found at http://www.cisconetworkers6.com/network/.
The same Linux laptop run a DNS server and was offering the
statistics over HTTP access. All HTTP accesses were logged including
the User-Agent header in order to collect statistics about the
browser and the operating system. The HTTP 64 aware [HTTP-64AWARE]
technique was also used to force stations to bypass the address
selection policy and use IPv6.
The Following applications were used as supporting infrastructure:
(1) MRTG (SNMP poll) [MRTG], (2) NFsen (supporting Netflow v9 with
IPv6 support) [NFSen], (3) NDPMON (to monitor ND activities)
[NDPMON], (4) RAMOND (to monitor RA activities) [RAMOND], DHCPv6
Server (Cisco IOS DHCPv6 Server).
3. Testing Steps and Procedure
o Monday 26th of January 9:00: the MRTG & Netflow collector are
connected to the Network;
o Tuesday 27th in the late afternoon, Google applies the DNS-trick
and starts serving A & AAAA to all laptops using the local DNS
server (only announced over DHCPv6)
o Wednesday 28th in the morning, the local DHCPv4 also serves a
Google-trick-enabled DNS servers to all DHCPv4 clients, i.e., all
laptops actually received the A and AAAA for Google
o Wednesday 28th 16:00, Router Advertisements include the M-flag for
a few minutes;
o Thursday 29th 9:0, RA includes the M-flag all day;
o Thursday 29th 14:00, RA prefix is advertised with a calendar
lifetime to 16:15;
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o Thursday 29th 16:15, no more IPv6 traffic (thanks to RA prefix
expiration), the router & collector are removed from the site;
4. Statistics
4.1. Round-Trip Time
The RTT was measured with ICMP echo requests & replies to
www.google.com and www.6net.org over IPv6. In general the time to
google remained constant from the conference (65 msec), while the RTT
to 6net was lower 50% until the AAAA to Google was enabled
(potentially due to higher IPv6 traffic load?).
The RTT to Google was also measured over IPv4 (average 64 msec, peak
218 msec) and IPv6 (average 65 msec, peak 72 msec). The use of a
6-in-4 tunnel was not really impacting the latency to access Google
if we assume that ICMP is a good measurement methodology.
4.2. Stats for IPv6 Traffic to the Internet
What can be seen in the graphs at
http://www.cisconetworkers6.com/mrtg/tunnel.html for the 6-in-4
tunnel is that there was a continuous growth in IPv6 traffic. There
was many less people on Monday than on the rest of the week due to
the conference organization and agenda.
Monday the inbound traffic (Internet to the conference) was around
100kbps, Tuesday 400kbps, Wednesday 1.5Mbps and Thursday also around
1.5 Mbps.
Outbound (conference to the Internet) can be seen for the 6-in-4
tunnel; there was also ongoing growth in IPv6 traffic. Monday the
traffic was low and around 10kbps, Tuesday 50kbps, Wednesday 100kbps
and Thursday also around 100kbps.
4.3. IPv6 DHCP Clients
Details to be found at
http://www.cisconetworkers6.com/mrtg/dhcpv6.html. From day 1, the
Cisco IOS router was configured as a DHCPv6 IA server. However, only
from Wednesday onwards, the M-bit was set in the Router
Advertisements. This setting had a very interresting result because
it made the number of DHCPv6 assigned addresses grow from 4 to a
total 151 systems using DHCPv6 IPv6 address allocation. This is a
clear indication that there were only 4 laptops with a IPv6 stack
always trying to use statefull DHCPv6 while the vast majority of the
laptops were only using RA for SLAAC. It can be assumed that the
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majority of the laptops were running Microsoft Windows XP or Vista.
4.4. IPv6 Neighbours
Details regarding the amount of IPv6 neighbors of the router can be
found at http://www.cisconetworkers6.com/mrtg/neighbours.html. The
neighbors were split in two categories based on the IPv6 address:
link-local or global addresses.
A couple of interesting observations:
o the number of IPv6 neighbors grew on every single day during the
conference, with a high peak on Wednesday 28th January.
o many systems had IPv6 enabled (555 stations) as seen by the Link-
local neighborships, however at maximum 358 were actually using
IPv6 to access the Internet.
o the number of link-local neighbors was similar on all days (except
on Monday because there were less attendees). But, the number of
global address neighbors changed dramatically on Wednesday morning
when the AAAA for Google was served: it doubled from 180 to 358.
4.5. DNS Requests
The traffic of DNS requests was also measured: 6 DNS requests/sec
over IPv4 and 2 DNS requets/sec over IPv6. This is probably linked
to the OS used on the laptops where the majority was probably Windows
XP which only use IPv4 for DNS access.
4.6. Web Server Access
In order to collect operating system information of the attendees, a
challenge was announced in order to attract users on a dual-stack web
server. Based on the number of attendees and the number of IPv6
neighbors, it is clear that the number of visitors (about 100) was
only a small parts of the local IPv6 hosts (about 555) or even
attendees (about 3,500).
o IPv6-enabled visitors: 20 *nix, 20 Microsoft Windows XP, 16
Microsoft Windows CE (smart-phones), 16 Apple Mac OS/X, 13
Microsoft Windows Vista, 6 Symbian (smart-phones)
o IPv4-only visitors: 70 Microsoft Windows XP, 13 Apple Mac OS/X, 9
Windows Vista and 25 *nic
4.7. Netflow Information
Based on Netflow information, some data-points were collected over
the 4 days:
o The IPv6 protocols: 84% for TCP, 10% for ICMPv6, the rest (7%) for
UDP. There were also a very small amount of IPv6 datagrams with
59 (No Next Header for IPv6): 73 packets on a total of more than
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8.7 millions.
o The layer-4 ports: 31% for NNTP, 30% for HTTP, 11% for SSH, 5% for
HTTPS, 3% for DNS. The rest was not clearly identified. This may
not be statiscally significant, but, the HTTP traffic went from
22% to 42% as soon as the AAAA for Google was served.
o The Internet hosts: 31% for 2001:888::119 (newszilla6.xs4all.nl),
7% for 2001:4860:0:1001::68 (Google), 5% for 2001:4860:0:1001::53
(Google), 5% for a site in the .NO domain, 5% for a site in the
.SE domain, 2% for a site in a .CZ domain (as the addresses seem
to relate to a non-public site, the authors preferred to keep
those addresses non-public as well).
4.8. Security
RAMOND and NDPMON detected not a single attack against the Neighbor
Discovery Protocol.
5. Areas for Improvements
A couple of areas for improvement have been identified after the
experiment:
o Compare the Netflow information for IPv4 and IPv6.
o Collect information about all the operating systems (both IPv4 and
IPv6), this could be done by sniffing the HTTP traffic and
collecting the User-Agent. This measurement will probably require
some legal advice in some countries...
6. IANA Considerations
There are no extra IANA consideration for this document.
7. Security Considerations
There are no extra Security consideration for this document.
8. Acknowledgements
Many thanks go to Tata Communications and Yves Poppe for the
sponsorship of the IPv6 Connectivity. We would also like to thank
Erik Kline and Lorenzo Colitti from Google to have supported the
deployment to enable AAAA DNS records for the Networkers Conference.
All of this experimenting would not of been possible without the help
from Cisco Networkers NOC team under leadership of Andy Phillips.
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9. References
9.1. Normative References
9.2. Informative References
[Tata] "Tata Communications
(http://www.tatacommunications.com/)".
[Google] "Google (http://www.google.com/)".
[Cisco] "Cisco Systems (http://www.cisco.com)".
[MRTG] Oetiker, Tobi., "The Multi Router Traffic Grapher
(http://oss.oetiker.ch/mrtg/)".
[NFSen] "NfSen - Netflow Sensor (http://nfsen.sourceforge.net/)".
[NDPMON] "NDPMon - IPv6 Neighbor Discovery Protocol Monitor
(http://ndpmon.sourceforge.net/)".
[RAMOND] Morse, James., "RAMOND (http://ramond.sourceforge.net/),
University of Southampton".
[HTTP-64AWARE]
Vyncke, E., "IPv6 Connectivity Check and Redirection by
HTTP Servers", 2008, <http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/
draft-vyncke-http-server-64aware-00.txt>.
Authors' Addresses
Eric Vyncke
Cisco Systems
De Kleetlaan 6a
Diegem 1831
Belgium
Phone: +32 2 778 4677
Email: evyncke@cisco.com
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Gunter Van de Velde
Cisco Systems
De Kleetlaan 6a
Diegem 1831
Belgium
Phone: +32 2704 5473
Email: gunter@cisco.com
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