IPv6 Addressing

Introduction

Introduction

IPv6 supports multiple addresses on an interface, and uses them in a manner comparable to subnetting an IPv4 VLAN. For example, where the switch is configured with multiple VLANs and each is connected to an IPv6 router, each VLAN will have a single link-local address and one or more global unicast addresses. This section describes IPv6 addressing and outlines the options for configuring IPv6 addressing on the switch. The configuration process includes automatically or statically creating an IPv6 address and automatically veri­ fying the uniqueness of each.

IPv6 Address Structure and FormatAddress Format

An IPv6 address is composed of 128 bits divided into eight 2-byte fields of hexadecimal values. The full format is:

xxxx : xxxx : xxxx : xxxx : xxxx : xxxx : xxxx : xxxx

where each field delimited by a colon (:) is a set of four hexadecimal digits.

For example:

2001:0db8:0000:00A9:0215:60ff:fe7a:adc0

2001:0db8:0260:0212:0000:0000:0000:01b4

The hexadecimal characters in IPv6 addresses are not case-sensitive.

Address Notation

Leading zeros in each field can be omitted as long as each field is represented by at least one value. The exception to this rule is when there is an uninter­ rupted series of zeros in one or more contiguous fields. In this case, the series of zeros can be replaced by “::”, with the restriction that “::” can be used only once in a given address. Applying this convention to the above examples results in the following address notations:

2001:db8::a9:215:60ff:fe7a:adc0

2001:db8:260:0212::01b4

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