IPv6 support

IBM® AIX® 7.1 with Technology Level 2 Cluster Aware AIX (CAA) introduces support for Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6) for network-based communications.

With this support, nodes are now able to participate in homogeneous IPv6 and heterogeneous IPv4 and IPv6 network environments.

Network interfaces configured with IPv6 are automatically detected and used by the CAA kernel communications services. Network interfaces configured with both IPv4 and IPv6 maintain heartbeat and communicate over both versions of IP.

The IPv6 multicast group is of site-local scope and is generated by using the IPv4 multicast group that was either manually specified or automatically generated. Specifically, the IPv4 multicast group occupies the bottom 32-bit word of a standard IPv6 site-local multicast address. The AIX 7 with 7100-02 CAA does not allow you to specify or change the IPv6 multicast group used for the cluster. The multiple-site feature introduced in AIX 7 with 7100-02 CAA requires that each site have its own unique multicast group. The site multicast group is either specified or automatically generated when the site is created. The ability to directly define a site's IPv6 multicast group is not supported.

You can upgrade an existing AIX 7 with 7100-01 or AIX 7 with 7100-01 SP4 release of a CAA cluster that does not have support for IPv6 to an AIX 7 with 7100-02 release of a CAA cluster that does have support for IPv6 through the process of a rolling upgrade. Additionally, for clusters that you plan to run IPv6 exclusively over their network topology, you need to specify the IPv6 capabilities flag during cluster creation to indicate that IPv6 support is required on all nodes to create the cluster.

VLAN pseudoadapter support

IBM AIX 7 with 7100-02 release of a Cluster Aware AIX (CAA) supports VLAN pseudoadapters for participation in VLAN networks. Network interfaces configured over VLAN pseudoadapters are automatically detected and used for CAA kernel communications services.