General configuration steps

This section provides an overview of the general configuration steps for enabling IPv6 on a given VLAN by any one of several commands. The following steps provide a suggested progression for getting started.

NOTE:

The ICMP and Neighbor Discovery (ND) parameters are set to default values at the global configuration level, are satisfactory for many applications, and generally do not need adjustment when you are first configuring IPv6 on the switch.

In the default configuration, IPv6 is disabled on all VLANs.

Procedure
  1. If IPv6 DHCP service is available, enable IPv6 DHCP on the VLAN. If IPv6 is not already enabled on the VLAN, enabling DHCPv6 also enables IPv6 and automatically configures a link-local address using the EUI-64 format.
    NOTE:

    If IPv6 is not already enabled on the VLAN, enabling DHCPv6 causes the switch to generate automatically, a link-local address. DHCPv6 does not assign a link-local address.

    A DHCPv6 server can provide other services, such as the addresses of time servers. For this reason, you may want to enable DHCP even if you are using another method to configure IPv6 addressing on the VLAN.

  2. If IPv6 DHCP service is not enabled on the VLAN, do either of the following:
    1. Enable IPv6 on the VLAN.

      Automatically configures a link-local address with an EUI-64 interface identifier.

    2. Statically configure a unicast IPv6 address on the VLAN.

      If you configure anything other than a link-local address, it enables IPv6 on the VLAN and the link-local address is automatically configured with an EUI-64 interface identifier

  3. If an IPv6 router is connected on the VLAN, then enable IPv6 address autoconfiguration to configure automatically a global unicast address with prefixes included in advertisements received from the router. The interface identifier used in addresses configured by this method will be the same as the interface identifier in the current link-local address.
  4. If needed, statically configure IPv6 unicast addressing on the VLAN interface as needed. Also includes statically replacing the automatically generated link-local address.