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Running SharePoint 2007 in IPv6 environment

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Why is IPv6 so important?  

In case you were wondering why IPv6 and supporting it in your environment is important, read the Royal Pingdom blog post - A crisis in the making: Only 4% of the Internet supports IPv6 

"... IPv6 adoption is going so slow that it has become a crisis in the making for the entire Internet. Three years from now there will be no IPv4 address space left. IPv6 needs to be fully adopted by then, but currently only 4% of the Internet supports IPv6...."

Yes! We are going to run out of IPv4 address space in 2+ years. You can also watch the counter here: IPv4 Exhaustion Counter (English) and even embed in your website or blog. At the time of writing this post, only 765 days are left for the X-day!!

SharePoint 2007 in IPv6 environment

For a SharePoint scenario, following 4 software components are important and all of them support IPv6 :-)

  1. Internet Explorer / Firefox
  2. Microsoft Windows
  3. Microsoft SQL Server
  4. Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) 2007

To learn more about running SharePoint in mix (IPv4 and IPv6) or a pure IPv6 environment, you can refer to the TechNet article - Internet protocol support in SharePoint Products and Technologies (Office SharePoint Server)

"... Because SharePoint Products and Technologies support both IPv4 and IPv6, the underlying Microsoft server operating system becomes a deciding factor on what environment should be used, as follows:

  • Windows Server 2008: By default, the IPv6 protocol and the IPv4 protocol are both installed and enabled. When both IPv4 and IPv6 are enabled, IPv6 is given preference over IPv4. Additionally, you can remove the IPv4 protocol so that the computer runs IPv6 exclusively.
  • Windows Server 2003: By default, the IPv6 protocol is not installed. However, it can be added ..."

 

Microsoft provides supported IPv6 implementations for Windows Server 2003, Windows XP with SP1 or later, Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008. Read the IPv6 for Microsoft Windows: Frequently Asked Questions for answers to commonly asked questions about the IPv6 protocol for the Microsoft Windows family of operating systems.

SQL Server and SQL Server Native Client fully support both Internet Protocol version 4 (IPv4) and Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6). When Windows is configured with IPv6 SQL Server, components automatically recognize the existence of IPv6. No special SQL Server configuration is necessary. This is the summary from SQL Server 2008 Books Online - Connecting Using IPv6 article.

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