More than 40 years ago IPv4 was introduced… It seems such a long time ago, and in the world of IT, 40 years is indeed a long time! 15 years later, with around 25% of IPv4 addresses allocated the IETF started to develop IPv6 to solve the addressing limitation.
Today we are still heavily relying on IPv4: from our home to the corporate network. At the same time, there is a growing adoption of IPv6.
It’s hard to say when IPv4 will disappear, or if it will, one thing we can say is that we are entering a phase where IPv6 will coexist with IPv4.
We saw this growing demand from our customers, partners, and more generally from the markets where we operate, to support IPv6 as part of our Automated Network Assurance Platform.
IP Fabric v4.0 was released back in October 2021 and unlike IPv4 which went quickly from IPv4 to IPv6 (What Happened to IPv5?), we are excited to announce the release of IP Fabric v5.0, where we will bring, amongst other great features, support for IPv6.
For a while, we had basic support of IPv6 for OSPFv3. To properly support IPv6, we had to change the legacy properties in our model. This means IPv6 information present in older snapshots will no longer be supported.
Information collected about IPv6 is now available in a number of existing tables and new dedicated ones have been created, for example:
In the coming releases, we will further develop our support of IPv6 in our security model and in the Path Lookup.
Note: The discovery of network devices is done via IPv4 only, pure IPv6 discovery is not yet supported.
Public or Private Cloud routers (AWS VPC, Azure VNet, VMware NSX, ACI…) require a different approach when handling security.
With the release v4.0 of IP Fabric, we changed the security model to prepare exactly for this! Without going into too much detail – there will be a future blog on this subject – IP Fabric supports:
Adding the cloud security support allows you to quickly visualize where a flow transiting to a Cloud, is being dropped or why an end user is complaining about a connectivity issue, in one single pane of glass.
DNS Basic configuration & DNS Resolver configuration
How to ensure you have consistent DNS settings on every network device? IP Fabric gathers details about DNS configuration and DNS resolver settings:
IP Fabric now collects information about DHCP Servers used for relay, option82 information, and statistics (per device or per interface - depending on vendor/family).
DHCP Server, currently implemented for Cisco and Juniper, brings information about configured DHCP servers including DHCP options, pools, leased addresses, excluded addresses, and interfaces listening for DHCP requests.
RSVP (Resource Reservation Protocol) support has been added for Juniper Junos and Cisco IOS, IOS-XE, and IOS-XR. We collect information about interfaces and neighbors. For Juniper, we also collect information about link protection.
New vendors: Aruba Instant and Ruckus wireless.
Like other Wireless vendors already supported, we only count one license per Controller, not for each Access Point.
Juniper MIST - device discovery process and API endpoint usage optimized. The implementation was refactored to allow caching and to use site-specific API calls instead of per-device API calls.
A lot has changed under the hood to ensure better stability of the tool. You may not be able to spot some of these updates, but if you want more information, don’t hesitate to reach out.
IP Fabric commits to keep support for all minor versions within the major version, for example in release 5.3.1 we will allow /api/v5.1/ calls. But API may break between major releases.
If API request status is 410 - it means you’re using the wrong version in the URL then we’re showing an Unknown error
This is the first phase of the implementation of RBAC. It will be propagated fully over the next few releases. You will already be able to refine access policies, using the new tables under Settings > User Authentication
IP Fabric v5.0 also brings 590+ improvements, additional features, and bug fixes. If you want to check the full list, please refer to the Release Notes.
If you are interested or curious to find out more after reading this blog, contact us!
More than 40 years ago IPv4 was introduced… It seems such a long time ago, and in the world of IT, 40 years is indeed a long time! 15 years later, with around 25% of IPv4 addresses allocated the IETF started to develop IPv6 to solve the addressing limitation.
Today we are still heavily relying on IPv4: from our home to the corporate network. At the same time, there is a growing adoption of IPv6.
It’s hard to say when IPv4 will disappear, or if it will, one thing we can say is that we are entering a phase where IPv6 will coexist with IPv4.
We saw this growing demand from our customers, partners, and more generally from the markets where we operate, to support IPv6 as part of our Automated Network Assurance Platform.
IP Fabric v4.0 was released back in October 2021 and unlike IPv4 which went quickly from IPv4 to IPv6 (What Happened to IPv5?), we are excited to announce the release of IP Fabric v5.0, where we will bring, amongst other great features, support for IPv6.
For a while, we had basic support of IPv6 for OSPFv3. To properly support IPv6, we had to change the legacy properties in our model. This means IPv6 information present in older snapshots will no longer be supported.
Information collected about IPv6 is now available in a number of existing tables and new dedicated ones have been created, for example:
In the coming releases, we will further develop our support of IPv6 in our security model and in the Path Lookup.
Note: The discovery of network devices is done via IPv4 only, pure IPv6 discovery is not yet supported.
Public or Private Cloud routers (AWS VPC, Azure VNet, VMware NSX, ACI…) require a different approach when handling security.
With the release v4.0 of IP Fabric, we changed the security model to prepare exactly for this! Without going into too much detail – there will be a future blog on this subject – IP Fabric supports:
Adding the cloud security support allows you to quickly visualize where a flow transiting to a Cloud, is being dropped or why an end user is complaining about a connectivity issue, in one single pane of glass.
DNS Basic configuration & DNS Resolver configuration
How to ensure you have consistent DNS settings on every network device? IP Fabric gathers details about DNS configuration and DNS resolver settings:
IP Fabric now collects information about DHCP Servers used for relay, option82 information, and statistics (per device or per interface - depending on vendor/family).
DHCP Server, currently implemented for Cisco and Juniper, brings information about configured DHCP servers including DHCP options, pools, leased addresses, excluded addresses, and interfaces listening for DHCP requests.
RSVP (Resource Reservation Protocol) support has been added for Juniper Junos and Cisco IOS, IOS-XE, and IOS-XR. We collect information about interfaces and neighbors. For Juniper, we also collect information about link protection.
New vendors: Aruba Instant and Ruckus wireless.
Like other Wireless vendors already supported, we only count one license per Controller, not for each Access Point.
Juniper MIST - device discovery process and API endpoint usage optimized. The implementation was refactored to allow caching and to use site-specific API calls instead of per-device API calls.
A lot has changed under the hood to ensure better stability of the tool. You may not be able to spot some of these updates, but if you want more information, don’t hesitate to reach out.
IP Fabric commits to keep support for all minor versions within the major version, for example in release 5.3.1 we will allow /api/v5.1/ calls. But API may break between major releases.
If API request status is 410 - it means you’re using the wrong version in the URL then we’re showing an Unknown error
This is the first phase of the implementation of RBAC. It will be propagated fully over the next few releases. You will already be able to refine access policies, using the new tables under Settings > User Authentication
IP Fabric v5.0 also brings 590+ improvements, additional features, and bug fixes. If you want to check the full list, please refer to the Release Notes.
If you are interested or curious to find out more after reading this blog, contact us!
