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IPv6 Support in Microsoft Windows
IPv6 is something that many administrators of Windows-based networks need to start taking seriously. Asian countries like China, South Korea, and Japan are already starting rollouts of IPv6 networks, and Europe and North America are likely to need to follow soon. Why? Because the current version IPv4 has some serious limitations that are causing it to show its age as a protocol. For instance, the exponential growth of the Internet has placed a heavy burden on the core routers in the Internet's backbone by making their routing tables so large that routing performance can be impacted. IPv4 also falls short in the area of security, and although using IPSec can add the necessary security, IPSec is complex to configure and maintain in real-world networking environments. IPv4 also falls short in the area of quality of service (QoS), and with Internet backbones carrying huge amounts of delay-sensitive voice and video traffic nowadays, maintaining QoS is essential to maintaining end-user satisfaction. Finally, network address translation (NAT) is only a stopgap measure to avoiding IP address exhaustion, and IPSec can't traverse NATs which makes using IPSec to secure small business networks problematic. (continue at source)