IPv6 IP addresses
IPv6 IP addresses are 128 bits long, compared to IPv4's 32-bit addresses. This gives room for many, many, many,
many more addresses.
The number of IPv4 IPs available is 2
32, or
4,294,967,296. For IPv6, however, the number is 2
128, or
340,282,366,920,938,463,463,374,607,431,768,211,456. That's a lot of IPs!
Now that we know the number of IPv6 addresses there are, we can get to the anatomy of the IPv6 address
The anatomy of IPv6 addresses
IPv4 addresses are generally in quad-dot notation, e.g.
192.168.73.200. IPv6 addresses use colons instead of dots and are larger that IPv4 addresses.
A fully qualified IPv6 address takes the format of
XXXX:XXXX:XXXX:XXXX:XXXX:XXXX:XXXX:XXXX. An example fully-qualified address is
FE80:0000:0000:0000:903A:1C1A:E802:11E4.
Do you see the long string of zeros? With IPv6 addresses, you can compress zeros to shorten the IP address.
You can compress zeros like this:
FE80:0:0:0:903A:1C1A:E802:11E4, or like this:
FE80::903A:1C1A:E802:11E4. Take note that you can only compress
one set of zeros to
::.
Like in this IP:
FE80:0000:0000:0000:903A:0000:0000:11E4, there are 2 sets of zeros. You could write it like this:
FE80::903A:0:0:11E4, or like this:
FE80:0:0:0:903A::11E4, but
not like this:
FE80::903A::11E4.
IPv6 subnetting
Just knowing how an IP address looks won't help you much when working with IPv6, you also need to know
subnetting. You probably know how subnetting works in IPv4, and to make IPv6 subnetting easier, you should understand CIDR.
IPv6 does away with netmasks like 255.255.255.0 and goes to complete classless subnetting.
The smallest subnet available is a /64, which contains
18.4 quintillion IP addresses.
The way a /64 IP address is broken up is the first 64 bits of the IP is the subnet prefix, and the last 64 bits is the interface ID.
The following tables show how the subnet divides the IP address.
| Breakout for fully qualified IP | /64 |
| Subnet prefix | Interface ID |
| 0000 | 1111 | 2222 | 3333 | 4444 | 5555 | 6666 | 7777 |
| Breakout for fully qualified IP | /48 |
| Subnet prefix | Interface ID |
| 0000 | 1111 | 2222 | 3333 | 4444 | 5555 | 6666 | 7777 |
| Breakout for fully qualified IP | /32 |
| Subnet | Interface ID |
| 0000 | 1111 | 2222 | 3333 | 4444 | 5555 | 6666 | 7777 |
Private IPv6 addresses
With the number of IPv6 addresses available, you might think that private IPs are no longer needed. But IPv6 has a few private IP ranges that are not globally routable.
Link-local addresses
Link-local addresses are designed to only be used on a local physical link. They are like IPv4's
169.254.0.0/16 subnet.
In IPv6, the link-local address block is
FE80::/10, this means that the subnet prefixes from
FE80 to
FEB0 are valid for link-local addressing
Link-local addresses are generated by either by converting the network interface's MAC address into a EUI-64 ID, or by generating a random ID.
An example link-local address with a random ID is
FE80::903A:1C1A:E802:11E4. This one was generated by Windows 7 with default IPv6 settings.
Site-local addresses - DEPRECATED
Site-local addresses were designed to be used at a site, but they were deprecated in 2004 by RFC3879.
The site-local address block is/was
FEC0::/10, spanning from
FEC0 to
FEF0
Private IP addresses
These addresses are for use in a private network, like IPv4's
10.0.0.0/8,
172.16.0.0/12, and
192.168.0.0/16 IP ranges.
The private IP subnet is
FD00::/7 with the eighth bit set to 1, so it's effectively
FD00::/8. The subnet ranges from
FD00 to
FDFF.
These addresses have a specific format that you should generally be followed. The format is listed below.
Using the example IP
FDC8:BF8B:E62C:ABCD:1111:2222:3333:4444, the breakout is as follows.
| Prefix | Global ID | Subnet ID | Interface ID |
| FD | C8BF8BE62C | ABCD | 1111:2222:3333:4444 |
An example of simple IPv6 private addresses is our network.
We use the IPv4 subnet
192.168.4.0/23, so and example IP is
192.168.4.120.
For IPv6, we just use
FD00::4:120. It's easy to remember because it's derived from the IPv4 address.
This is the breakout of the Private IP:
| Prefix | Global ID | Subnet ID | Interface ID |
| FD | 0000000000 | 0000 | 0000:0000:0004:0120 |