Difficulties of a /64

[D. Strout]

I've talked to several providers in the past few days looking to get a /64 on a KVM VPS. All of them have said they are unable to provide such a feature. I'm curious: to you providers out there, what makes it so hard? Note that I'm not saying this in a derogatory "why can't you do a simple thing like this you morons" way, I just want to know the difficulties of providing this to a customer. Note that all the companies I asked had their own AS with their own IPv6 allocations, and remember this is a KVM VPS, so those two things aren't the issue. Finally, no offers please - I know several companies that can do this, and I don't need any offers here.

 

[Nett]

Usually a dedicated server is assigned with a /64, not a VPS

 

[SkylarM]

Do they use solus?

Obviously you can manually bind IPv6 anyways, but rDNS and things of that nature would be troublesome to say the least. We've given IPv6 in /64's to KVM customers that request it, but it's entirely manual and involves a spreadsheet on our end to keep track of things, which isn't quite as nice as binding a handful of IPv6 via the Solus panel.

I do wish Solus behaved better with IPv6 and subnets, so we could say assign an IPv6 block to a container/customer and then they can bind from under that and still have IPv6 capabilities -- I know a bunch of custom panels offer that, but Solus is lacking (of course) in that area.

 

[D. Strout]

Solus is lacking in that area.

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. What with Solus' pervasiveness in that area, I guess that makes things harder.

 

[SkylarM]

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. What with Solus' pervasiveness in that area, I guess that makes things harder.

The few times we allowed /64's on a KVM vps we made it extremely clear that the customer was responsible for binding IPv6 under that subnet and that we'd not offer any direct support in that department. I cannot directly blame a provider using Solus denying a /64 request, but if you explain that you know what you are doing and all that I'd expect them to be a little more willing to cooperate.

 

[iWF-Jacob]

Try checking out tier.net -- they may be able to help you. Not an offer, just a suggestion -- my guess is that most companies may be hesitant to give that outright to you, but if you have a proven track-record with them, they might be more inclined. Or have you maybe thought about asking if you can work your way up to a /64?

 

[trewq]

Try checking out tier.net -- they may be able to help you. Not an offer, just a suggestion -- my guess is that most companies may be hesitant to give that outright to you, but if you have a proven track-record with them, they might be more inclined. Or have you maybe thought about asking if you can work your way up to a /64?

You shouldn't need to work up to it. A /64 is a end user assignment.

 

[SkylarM]

You shouldn't need to work up to it. A /64 is a end user assignment.

^This.

Another idea, if you're just after being able to assign a specific set of IPv6 (preference on it not being random garbled numbers/letters that solus assigns IPv6 as), you could try requesting the host to add specific IPv6 addresses and assigning them to your container. See what wiggle room they give you on that. I have a guy with 6 or so OpenVZ vps that had a specific requirement for numbering and we just manually added the ones he wanted instead of trying to fiddle with a full /64 being wonky and hard to keep track of on our end.

Still ends up depending on the provider if they want to put in that extra bit of effort or not

 

[willie]

Can someone explain the usefulness of such a large address block on a vps?

 

[iWF-Jacob]

You shouldn't need to work up to it. A /64 is a end user assignment.

Sure, it's an end user assignment, but it's also 18,446,744,073,709,551,616 IPv6 addresses. Which is a decent amount of addresses, not necessarily for IPv6 -- but it's a large number. 

 

[trewq]

Sure, it's an end user assignment, but it's also 18,446,744,073,709,551,616 IPv6 addresses. Which is a decent amount of addresses, not necessarily for IPv6 -- but it's a large number.

I think you need to research IPv6 and how it's designed.

 

[D. Strout]

The reason I need a /64 is for pushing IPv6 through a VPN - see

 

[iWF-Jacob]

I think you need to research IPv6 and how it's designed.

Oh, I'm certainly no expert on IPv6. I'm still working on updating my CCNA, just gotta put that one final push before I go test. But I think I have at least an okay understanding of it, Thanks though

 

[Nick_A]

Right, we don't do it yet because it requires manually keeping track of assignments on our end. My spreadsheets are already messy enough :/

 

[maounique]

We are doing it for all KVMs, however, we only offer limited rDNS setup, i.e. you can ask it for a couple of addresses and not more than a couple of times.

Also, all Xen's, including XenPower can receive an /64 upon request. Management is automated, users can get their /64 by filling a form with their IPv4. In theory, you can get an /64 for every IPv4.

http://prometeus.net/returnipv6.php

 

[Wintereise]

On properly vLaned networks (which is the way your networks SHOULD BE setup, this is 2014), you'll have to perform an addition every time a customer signs up.

The easy way around this is just assigning /48s to nodes instead, and then further delegating from that -- which is what most people who do supply /64s with every vm do.

You'll need a robust IPAM that integrates with whatever the hell you use to interface with customers to make it work though, which is precisely why nobody in the lowend market does it.

Right, we don't do it yet because it requires manually keeping track of assignments on our end. My spreadsheets are already messy enough :/

Get an IPAM, they exist precisely to make this easier.

 

[Virtovo]

Get an IPAM, they exist precisely to make this easier.

This is quite a nice script for IPAM:

http://www.gestioip.net/

 

[Magiobiwan]

Feathur (when IPv6 is finished) should allow delegating of various IPv6 blocks including a /64. I haven't looked at the code recently, but IPv6 is coming along nicely. Can't wait for it to be finished!

 

[maounique]

The easy way around this is just assigning /48s to nodes instead

/56 working just fine.

 

[Magiobiwan]

I think a /56 per node would be more than enough. That's enough for 256 separate /64 allocations. You're not likely to get more than 256 VPSes on a node (unless it's really beefy, and even then you'd probably run into some process count issues).