RE: The state of IPv6 multihoming development

["Tony Hain" <alh-ietf@tndh.net>]

Iljitsch van Beijnum wrote:
> I don't see any relationship with interdomain multicast, so 
> the fact that this has been hard to deploy in the past (and 
> unless I'm mistaken the scalability problems have now been 
> largely solved) doesn't say anything about translation mechanisms.

Passing around state between administrative entities is always a trust
problem.

> 
> Anything that happens in end-hosts should scale well. Moving 
> the functionality to a different box outside, but still close 
> to, the end-hosts should also scale as long as it's possible 
> to deploy an arbitrary number of those boxes = no hard state. 

As long as all participants are the same adminstrative entity, scaling
is not a serious problem.

> Content delivery systems often use complex NAT setups to 
> balance the load and provide redundancy. Since what we're 
> proposing here is simpler than NAT, I see no reason why it 
> wouldn't work or scale.

But those content systems are run by a single entity. When multiple
parties are involved, the translation is done at a higher layer.

> 
> And if for the truly huge networks this solution isn't 
> viable, they can always use IPv4-style multihoming. (But 
> they'd still need to implement all of this in order to be 
> able to talk to others who use multi-address
> multihoming.)

We will end up with a system that looks like IPv4 muti-homing to the
sites that want that, but scales better for the service providers.
Anything less on either front is a non-starter.

Tony