On Thursday, 12/08/2005 at 08:22 EST, "Mrohs, Ray" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> 
wrote:
> I have  been asked to comment on the readiness of our z800 to migrate to 
IPv6. 
> The  environment includes z/VM 5.1, OSA Express/Express 2, VSWITCH, Suse 
SLES8 
> and SLES9, VM TCPIP for tn3270, and RSCS for network printing. From what 
I  can 
> tell, the VM TCPIP stack is only partially capable. Does anyone have 
any real 
> life experience or done testing in a similar environment? I'd like  to 
know 
> what the issues are.  Thanks.     
  
z/VM 5.1 has IPv6 C [IUCV] socket support, but none of the IBM-provided C 
applications have been changed to exploit it.  And the TN3270 server is a 
Pascal application so it cannot be made to use IPv6 until we add IPv6 to 
the Pascal API.  RSCS has not been updated for IPv6.

A layer 2 VSWITCH [TYPE ETHERNET] will operate with IPv6 guests.  However, 
the VM TCP/IP stack itself cannot connect to or use a layer 2 VSWITCH.

Bottom line: Using only software from IBM, your Linux guests can operate 
with IPv6, but VM TCP/IP will need to be connected to a local IPv4 
network.  I believe there are appliances (hardware or Linux guest-based) 
that can bridge IPv6 and IPv4 networks.  Qualifer: I have no real life 
experience doing this.

Alan Altmark
z/VM Development
IBM Endicott

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