On Fri, 1 May 2020 at 09:23, Paul Bone <[email protected]> wrote: > I am an IPv6 proponent but have come up against a real anti-IPv6 sentiment > from the vast majority of customer IT managers. > > I would love to hear from anyone who has managed to successfully push IPv6 > into the SME world in the UK and make this a useful discussion for the > benefit of the community - I'm sure I am not the only one experiencing this > issue. > > Incidentally, I have deployed dual-stack to residential customers of a local > WISP (I am also a customer) for over three years now - they just don't know > they have it!.
TL,DR: * you need some sort of business case for it, particularly if contractors will have to be brought in to set it up. * you need to find someone who's interested in it in the IT/networks side who's not risk averse * you need to find some easy to digest happy stories or reference sites to make the client less scared * you need to be confident about it, able to reassure the organisation that you can roll back easily if you hit a snag, and roll forwards again until the situation is stable The long version... This is my most recent experience where I was actively working/trying to get v6 into our division. I worked for what was the Cambridge division of a French multinational (they're now sold off after a weird merger situation, but I digress). We had a number of customers who wanted IPv6 to be officially supported but I, in DevOps, was perhaps the only person who had any experience of rolling it out. I'd successfully rolled it out before, but this time I was not in charge of the infrastructure so I was down to me to persuade or cajole or argue for it. I never succeeded. The problems I had were as follows: * a significant number of the IT/infrastructure people were contractors, including senior engineers, and they were very risk averse. Their work was very clearly defined and they saw IPv6 as an interesting diversion. They were happy to talk about it but needed a full business case to be written to justify it, and then the company would have needed to do it as a formal project with budgets etc. They actually liked the idea because it would have looked good on their CVs, but needed the justification. * a fair number of the senior management were old boys who could only see that IPv4 was working fine, and since the market was fairly mature and customers tended to be big corporates with professional networking teams who could do their own v6 work-rounds, the management didn't see a need. When I talked about writing a business case, I felt I got blank stares. I wasn't sufficiently senior enough to push the agenda. * I manage to get the interest of the non-contractor IT guys, and hatched up a "skunk works" project to set up a sandbox v6 network, whereby they would set up a completely separate vLAN for ipv6 with their old/spare firewall appliance and work on it that way. And then I left, because of financial reasons, the looming merger thing, and the promise of greener grass in a new place. In my current position, in a small startup, I'm the only person who deeply understands networking at all. I'm working on getting ipv6 into our managed office, which will require working alongside the IT guy, and getting the office management company to talk to the ISP to get an allocation of IPv6. I feel it will be a slow uphill struggle. My first IPv6 deployment was in a small business, now swallowed up by a giant, and I did it by stealth with the quiet nod of the tech head of systems. I turned it on one evening when the office was almost empty and I waited for the howls of protest, and fortunately nothing. The only thing that broke was an access control list on the mail server, something I didn't know existed.
