OpenSDN, formerly known as Tungsten Fabric, has long been recognized for its dual IP stack support. This feature is crucial in today’s networking landscape, where both IPv4 and IPv6 coexist. While IPv4 address space exhaustion necessitates IPv6 adoption for modern industrial applications, many organizations continue to rely on IPv4 in private and public networks.
The dual IP stack functionality sets OpenSDN (and its predecessors Tungsten Fabric and OpenContrail) apart from other SDN platforms. It enables support for cutting-edge network applications while maintaining backwards compatibility with legacy IPv4 services.
Although Tungsten Fabric had made significant strides in IPv6 protocol support, some valuable network functions remained limited to IPv4 addresses. The latest R24.1 release of OpenSDN addresses several of these limitations:
- Metadata service over IPv6: This addition allows the use of pure IPv6 virtual networks without requiring auxiliary IPv4 networks (commits feee59b, feee59b, f6c2579, 61c062d).
- NAT66 (IPv6 to IPv6 Network Address Translation): implementation of this feature enables floating IP functionality for IPv6 (commits 34c6468, ef617f8).
- Virtual DNS service: extended to work with IPv6 floating IP (commit eeba013).
- Server foundation classes: The codebase has been updated to allow instances of TcpServer, HttpServer, and other server foundation classes to bind to IPv6 addresses (commit c0527f4).
These enhancements further solidify OpenSDN‘s position as a versatile SDN platform capable of meeting the diverse needs of modern network environments. For even more details on some of the implementation details, see my personal blog.
