[ipv6-wg] New version (or followup) of RIPE-501 document...

> On 06/20/2011 12:40 PM, Tim Chown wrote:
> > I think load balancers should be included; I know some universities who
> did not take part in W6D not because their web servers couldn't be made v6
> ready, but because their load balancers could not.
> 
> Although the thread may deviate a bit, since we got into the topic of
> load balancers, does anyone have any pointers or references to work
> describing how load balancers can/should operate in an IPv6 environment?
> 
> The reasons for asking are:
> 
> - we need such references to include in RIPE-501
> - in the IPv4 world a lot of the load balancing logic has to do
> with NAT. In IPv6, NAT should be a forbidden notion. Of course someone
> could just terminate connections and open new ones in backend farms of
> machines effectively acting as an application layer proxy.

Getting more and more off-topic, but regardless of what purists might think, load balancing is a crucial function (until TCP stack and/or socket API get fixed - read: not likely) and at least some of them do and will use some sort of NAT to do their job.

Of course those vendors that can do high-speed TCP termination (sometimes even in hardware) will tell you why that's infinitely better ... and the purists will be happy because you've replaced abhorred NAT with oh-so-much-better TCP relay ;) Unfortunately, the net result is the same - loss of direct end-to-end client-to-server connectivity.

Just my mildly sarcastic view of the NAT-in-LB topic
Ivan