> Alternatively, you could create a virtual network/link within > the physical host,
This is precisely what machine virtualization already does. And many setups involve a set of physical hosts providing resources, and a set of virtual machines consuming resources. A management system migrates the virtual machines from host to host as it tries to make the best use of the resources. At any given point in time, the only way to truly know what virtual machines are on a given physical host is to ask the physical host. Since the virtual machines use virtual network interfaces provided by the physical host, this physical host can see MAC addresses and IP addresses. As a management problem, this can be easily solved by an agent which runs on the physical hosts therefore I don't think the IETF needs to do work on this problem. What would be good is for more people to implement pure IPv6 networks on their virtual machine infrastructure and write about it. Since virtualization increases the number of IP addresses consumed per physical machine, it could lead to IPv4 exhaustion happening sooner rather than later. By using pure IPv6 on the virtual machines there is effectively no limit to the number of addresses that can be used, and if someone wants to implement some kind of structured numbering system in their /64 subnet, the bits are freely available to do this. This USENIX paper: http://www.usenix.org/events/usenix06/tech/menon/menon_html/index.html Optimizing Network Virtualization in Xen provides some information on how one of the more popular virtualization environments handles networking. --Michael Dillon -------------------------------------------------------------------- IETF IPv6 working group mailing list [email protected] Administrative Requests: https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ipv6 --------------------------------------------------------------------
