As your global customers, vendors, partners and suppliers move to IPv6, your initial goal is to enable clients -- whether individuals or businesses -- to connect to your website. These people must be able to reach you to continue doing business with you. Today, 90% of them might operate on IPv4, but it's only a matter of time before you need to work with a supplier or manufacturer in India or China that can only operate on IPv6.

If you use dual-stacked (ADCs) to manage traffic to your Web servers, you can accomplish this step making few if any changes to the servers themselves. ADCs that understand both IPv4 and IPv6 can be used as gateway devices to proxy IPv6 traffic to IPv4. Assign your ADCs the new virtual IPv6 addresses and have them point to your existing IPv4-based Web servers. Then, add those new IPv6 addresses to your DNS and make them publicly available on IPv6 to establish your presence on the IPv6 Internet. Your ADC devices will continue handling requests from IPv4 clients as usual, but they will also be able to serve requests from IPv6-only clients, directing them to your existing IPv4-based Web servers.

IN DEPTH:

Remember, your goal in this phase is simply to enable your customers and the general public to stay connected to you. If your DNS servers can return an IPv6 record to an IPv6 client, then you've accomplished that goal -- without making any infrastructure or application changes.

Phase II: Consider the core network, protecting your Web applications and network resources.