Now that World IPv6 Launch is behind us, let’s look into how a sampling of network hardware vendors support IPv6 on their web sites. Will they offer production-quality web sites over IPv6?
For this post’s eponymous test, I’ll use the familiar ‘dig’ tool to test the existence of an AAAA record for primary web sites (e.g., no ipv6.vendor.net).
AAAA Record Test
PASS - Cisco, Juniper, Ericsson, Brocade, Huawei, A10, F5, Checkpoint
FAIL – Dell, Alcatel-Lucent, Ciena, Arista, HP, Avaya, Tellabs, Nokia Siemens Networks, ZTE (US and China sites)
Not bad. Given the sad state of IPv6 deployment in wireless, I’m actually surprised that any of the traditional mobile packet core vendors have an IPv6 site. 
Of our eight vendors’ sites with AAAA records, I wonder how many will depend on IPv4 to display identically as when visited by an IPv4-only host. This will surely uncover IPv4 dependencies, right? I turned off my IPv4 stack and visited the sites again.
Visual Parity with IPv4 Test
PASS - Cisco, Juniper, Ericsson, Brocade, Huawei, A10, F5
FAIL – Checkpoint
Checkpoint’s site had a few problems. The button to chat with a sales representative disappeared, and hovering over other buttons made the them invisible. Yes, my test is very subjective. I was looking for obvious failures that an average user would notice.
For the seven finalists, I’ll search for “IPv6″ from the main site and click on the first search result. Note that I am keeping IPv4 turned off.
“IPv6″ Search Test
PASS – Juniper, Ericsson, F5, A10
FAIL - Cisco, Brocade
For both Cisco and Brocade, the search results server lacks an AAAA record (tools.cisco.com and search.brocade.com). I couldn’t execute my test on Huawei because a search for “IPv6″ returns zero results for “Global – English” content. Come on, Huawei.
What can we conclude from all this? Probably not too much. What would be really enlightening would be knowing how many of these vendors run IPv6 on their enterprise networks.
About Jeff Loughridge
