Operation Manual – IPv6 Management
H3C S3100 Series Ethernet Switches
Chapter 1 IPv6 Configuration
1-1
Chapter 1 IPv6 Configuration
Note:
z
H3C S3100 Series Ethernet Switches support IPv6 management features, but do
not support IPv6 forwarding and related features.
z
The term “router” in this document refers to a router in a generic sense or an
Ethernet switch running a routing protocol.
1.1 IPv6 Overview
Internet protocol version 6 (IPv6), also called IP next generation (IPng), was designed
by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) as the successor to Internet protocol
version 4 (IPv4). The significant difference between IPv6 and IPv4 is that IPv6
increases the IP address size from 32 bits to 128 bits.
1.1.1 IPv6 Features
I. Header format simplification
IPv6 cuts down some IPv4 header fields or move them to extension headers to reduce
the load of basic IPv6 headers. IPv6 uses a fixed-length header, thus making IPv6
packet handling simple and improving the forwarding efficiency. Although the IPv6
address size is four times that of IPv4 addresses, the size of basic IPv6 headers is only
twice that of IPv4 headers (excluding the Options field). For the specific IPv6 header
format, see
Figure 1-1
.