These are the minutes of the IPv6 Business Information Exchange meeting held on January 26, 2010.

This session was presented by Dr. Peter Welcher who discussed IPv6 addressing plans, and related considerations. It included discussion of the following topics and questions:

• How should an organization, especially a medium to large enterprise, university, or government agency, go about planning its use of IPv6 addresses?
• What considerations go into obtaining one or more IPv6 prefixes for your organization?
• Thinking outside the box: NAT for IPv6 is heretical, but can look attractive; will your /48 give you enough subnet bits; should you stick with /64 prefixes only?
• Do you map your IPv4 addressing to IPv6, or start over with a new plan?
• Some IPv4 techniques that might be applicable to IPv6 address allocation?
• Working ends against the middle, to preserve your options (and potential drawbacks).

The author has been tracking IPv6 for several years. He has conducted an IPv6 migration planning analyses for two government organizations with thousands of users, developed a related IPv6 practice document used as the basis for efforts by co-workers elsewhere, and is currently deploying an mapped IPv6 addressing scheme for a 12,000 user government sub-agency campus. Dr. Welcher regularly speaks at events including Cisco Networkers, contributed significantly to the last revisions to the Cisco CCDA/CCDP prep courses, and consults on network design, using broad experience working in a number of technical networking areas. He works for Chesapeake Netcraftsmen, a consulting firm and Cisco Premier Partner consisting of 30 experts with 11 CCIE's, including 4 double CCIE's (Routing & Switching, and Security). Chesapeake Netcraftsmen holds all the major Cisco partner specializations (Advanced Routing Switching, Unified Communications, Security, Data Center, Wireless), and has done significant work for all three federal government branches, city and state governments, major financial and law firms, major hospitals, and universities.