A high-availability environment is a key requirement for any enterprise and is critical when an organization experiences system downtime or network or app failures. With a high availability deployment of two NetScaler ADC nodes in active-passive mode, with the same configurations, organizations can prevent interruptions to their operations.

AWS supports the IPv6 protocol in its networking components like VPC, subnets, and ENI, but doesn’t provide a default failover mechanism. When there’s an instance failover, it can have an impact on traffic and affect your business.

NetScaler ADC has supported various high-availability environments within the same zone or across zones. However, cloud limitations meant there was no support for IPv6 addresses in high availability.

Not anymore! We are excited to announce that beginning with the NetScaler ADC 13.1.26.x release, you can configure the same zone with IPv6 addresses in AWS. With this new feature, you don’t have to struggle with downtime in your IPv6 environment and can realize the benefits of high availability — less downtime, greater flexibility, simpler maintenance, and more.

You can configure IPv6 addresses as VIP and SNIP on NetScaler ADC. Upon failover, they are moved from the failed-over instance to the new primary instance. The enhanced logic minimizes downtime to just a few seconds.

IPv6 HA support in NetScaler ADC is designed to work in parallel with IPv4 HA, as well, without additional configuration. If the need arises, you can have a hybrid setup, with both IPv6 and IPv4 HA. Learn more about IPv4 HA in our product documentation.

Prerequisites

An IAM role is required for high-availability deployments as detailed in our product documentation. In order for an HA pair in the same AWS zone to work, you also need the following IAM role permissions for IPv6 HA:

• ec2:AssignIpv6Addresses
• ec2:UnassignIpv6Addresses

Learn More

All topologies, including IPv4 to IPv6, IPv6 to IPv4, and IPv6 to IPv6, are supported. Learn more about NetScaler ADC and the IPv6 configuration in our product documentation.