Hi Fred,
On Aug 6, 2009, at 1:42 PM, Templin, Fred L wrote:
How are non-TCP/UDP flows handled by these legacy systems today? For example, 6to4 uses ip-proto-41.
My understanding is that these flows will not be handled well... Since ECMP load balancers will have limited information available (the two IP address and the next header value), they will group all of the traffic between two 6to4 tunnel endpoints into a single flow. If it becomes common for pairs of tunnel endpoints to transmit large amounts of data across ISP networks, this could present a significant operational issue for the Internet.
This problem (and the LISP problem) could potentially be alleviated by hardware that performs load balancing based on the IP address, the next header and the IPv6 flow label. But, according to folks who ought to know, most of the IPv6 routers they have deployed can't handle load balancing based on anything but a UDP or TCP 5-tuple, even in IPv6 (no IPv6 flow label, no UDP-Lite, no SCTP, etc.). This is rather distressing, but I have no reason to doubt their statements.
Margaret -------------------------------------------------------------------- IETF IPv6 working group mailing list ipv6@ietf.org Administrative Requests: https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ipv6 --------------------------------------------------------------------
