IPv6 addressing overview
IPv6 was designed to replace IPv4, the Internet protocol that is most commonly used currently throughout the world. IPv6 increases the
number of network address bits from 32 (IPv4) to 128 bits, which provides more than enough unique IP addresses to support all of the
network devices on the planet into the future. IPv6 is expected to quickly become the network standard.
An IPv6 address is composed of 8 elds of 16-bit hexadecimal values separated by colons (:). The following gure shows the IPv6
address format.
FIGURE 16 IPv6 address format
As shown in the above gure, HHHH is a 16-bit hexadecimal value, while H is a 4-bit hexadecimal value. The following is an example of
an IPv6 address.
2001:0000:0000:0200:002D:D0FF:FE48:4672
Note that this IPv6 address includes hexadecimal elds of zeros. To make the address less cumbersome, you can do the following:
• Omit the leading zeros; for example, 2001:0:0:200:2D:D0FF:FE48:4672.
• Compress the successive groups of zeros at the beginning, middle, or end of an IPv6 address to two colons (::) once per
address; for example, 2001::200:2D:D0FF:FE48:4672.
When specifying an IPv6 address in a command syntax, keep the following in mind:
• You can use the two colons (::) only once in the address to represent the longest successive hexadecimal elds of zeros
• The hexadecimal letters in IPv6 addresses are not case-sensitive
As shown in Figure 16, the IPv6 network prex is composed of the left-most bits of the address. As with an IPv4 address, you can
specify the IPv6 prex using the prex / prex-length format, where the following applies.
The prex parameter is specied as 16-bit hexadecimal values separated by a colon.
The prex-length parameter is specied as a decimal value that indicates the left-most bits of the IPv6 address.
The following is an example of an IPv6 prex.
2001:DB8:49EA:D088::/64
IPv6 address types
As with IPv4 addresses, you can assign multiple IPv6 addresses to a switch interface. IPv6 address types presents the three major types
of IPv6 addresses that you can assign to a switch interface.
A major dierence between IPv4 and IPv6 addresses is that IPv6 addresses support scope , which describes the topology in which the
address may be used as a unique identier for an interface or set of interfaces.
IPv6 addressing overview
FastIron Ethernet Switch Layer 3 Routing
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