Learn about SD-WAN support of Ethernet interfaces having a static IPv6 address,
static IPv6 routes, and more.
SD-WAN supports IPv6 interfaces, beginning with SD-WAN plugin 3.2. You have the
flexibility to onboard branch locations in a hybrid IPv4/IPv6 environment or a full
IPv6 environment. SD-WAN IPv6 support uses intelligent application path steering
technology to provide application reliability and SLAs for IPv6 environments. SD-WAN
IPv6 support includes the following changes:
- You can configure a physical Ethernet interface to have a static IPv6 address.
- You can configure a static IPv6 route.
- The Advanced Routing Engine allows you to configure IPv6 BGP routing.
- SD-WAN provides health monitoring for the next hop from SD-WAN-enabled IPv6
interfaces and health monitoring for a VPN tunnel endpoint.
- Path monitoring now allows you to use
addresses from an IP4 VPN address pool or an IPv6 VPN address pool.
- When an SD-WAN interface is enabled for IPv6, Auto VPN configuration creates a
DIA interface named sdwan.9016, which
has IPv6 physical interfaces as member interfaces. The default IPv6 route points
to the sdwan.9016 interface. The user interface allows you to specify whether
the virtual interface is a DIA IPv4 interface, DIA IPv6 interface, or tunnel
interface (which can have a mix of IPv4 tunnel interfaces and IPv6 tunnel
interfaces). An Ethernet interface can belong to both the sdwan.901 virtual
interface and the sdwan.9016 virtual interface.
SD-WAN supports dual stack in the event that one ISP provides you with only an IPv4
address and another ISP provides you with only an IPv6 address. You will create
separate virtual SD-WAN interfaces. An IPv4 DIA virtual interface will have Ethernet
with an IPv4 address, while an IPv6 DIA virtual interface will have Ethernet with an
IPv6 address.
If a DIA link between a branch and a hub has only IPv6 addresses on the interfaces at
each end, the tunnel is created using IPv6 addresses. If the branch and hub have
IPv4 addresses on the interfaces, the tunnel is created using IPv4 addresses. If the
branch and hub use both IPv4 and IPv6 addresses on the interfaces, the tunnel is
created using IPv4 addresses only (IPv4 addresses are preferred). If there is a
mismatch of address family identifiers (AFI) between the hub and branch, no tunnel
configuration is generated for that pair of interfaces.
Similarly, a VPN address pool can have both IPv4 and IPv6 addresses configured, in
which case IPv4 addresses are preferred for the tunnel interface and tunnel
monitoring. If the IPv4 addresses in the VPN address pool are exhausted, then IPv6
addresses are used for the tunnel interface and tunnel monitoring.
You can also have independent IPv4 VPN address pools that contain IPv4 addresses and
IPv6 VPN address pools that contain IPv6 addresses.
