What is ipv6??

So what is all this hype about ipv6??

IP, the Internet Protocol, is one of the pillars which supports the Internet. Almost 20 years old, first specified in a remarkably concise 45 pages in RFC 791, IP is the network-layer protocol for the Internet.
ipv6 a.k.a. IPng (Next Generation) is an upgraded version of ipv4.

IPv6 is designed to solve the problems of IPv4. It does so by creating a new version of the protocol which serves the function of IPv4, but without the same limitations of IPv4. IPv6 is not totally different from IPv4: what you have learned in IPv4 will be valuable when you deploy IPv6. The differences between IPv6 and IPv4 are in five major areas: addressing and routing, security, network address translation, administrative workload, and support for mobile devices. IPv6 also includes an important feature: a set of possible migration and transition plans from IPv4.

So What’s In It?

Even if you’ve never studied IPv6, you may know about its most famous feature: big addresses. IPv4 uses 32-bit addresses, and with the growth of the Internet, these have become a scarce and valuable commodity. Organizations have gone to great lengths to deal with the shortage and high cost of IPv4 addresses. The most visible change in IPv6 is that addresses balloon from 32-bits to 128-bits.

Feature	Change
Address Space	Increase from 32-bit to 128-bit address space
Management	Stateless autoconfiguration means no more need to configure IP addresses for end systems, even via DHCP
Performance	Predictable header sizes and 64-bit header alignment mean better performance from routers and bridges/switches
Multicast/Multimedia	Built-in features for multicast groups, management, and new "anycast" groups
Mobile IP	Eliminate triangular routing and simplify deployment of mobile IP-based systems
Virtual Private Networks	Built-in support for ESP/AH encrypted/authenticated virtual private network protocols; built-in support for QoS tagging

The address range is huge.While IPv4 allows 32 bits for an Internet Protocol address, and can therefore support 2³² (4,294,967,296) addresses, IPv6 uses 128-bit addresses, so the new address space supports 2¹²⁸ (approximately 340 undecillion or 3.4×1038) addresses. This expansion allows for many more devices and users on the internet as well as extra flexibility in allocating addresses and efficiency for routing traffic. It also eliminates the primary need for network address translation (NAT), which gained widespread deployment as an effort to alleviate IPv4 address exhaustion.

So now you its gonna be tough to remember the ip addresses. For e.g., the ipv4 was 32-bit & represented like 74.125.236.80  which now would be something like 2001:4860:0:1001::68(pretty hard to remember huhnn..).

          You can see ipv6.google.com is resolving to an IPv6 address.

For now,keep googling on ipv4.Will be back with some more on ipv6.