In case the industry press hasn’t told you yet, tomorrow is the World IPv6 Launch day. While the obstinate naysayers will still claim IPv6 doesn’t matter (but then there are people believing in flat Earth being ~6000 years old and riding on a stack of turtles), the rest of us should be prepared to enable IPv6 when needed … and it all starts with the networking equipment that supports IPv6 and has IPv6 performance that has at least the same order of magnitude as the IPv4 performance.

It’s impossible to keep current with all the IPv6-related RFCs and other requirements, and requesting “equipment that supports IPv6” will enable everyone to pull wool over your eyes (including the vendors that claim to have IPv6-ready equipment). Fortunately, Jan Žorž, one of the great IPv6 evangelists started a “let’s make an official list of requirements” process a few years ago, which resulted in RIPE-501 published in November 2010.

Jan didn’t stop there – he gathered a great team of co-authors, they spent over a year polishing RIPE-501-bis, included tons of comments from the RIPE IPv6 mailing list, and the result has just been published: RIPE-544, a document that you can use during the equipment evaluation and in the RFP creation process. The German government did just that and created an IPv6 profile that closely mirrors RIPE-554 (which was not yet available at that time).