Hi Michael, O/H michael.dillon@bt.com έγραψε: [...]
The thing that worries me about giving any kind of special support to any sort of VM deployment is that it will cause the IPv4 address space to run out sooner. The consumption rate is no longer constrained to the number of CPU chips produced but now can grow faster which leads to a power law increase in demand.
Yes, yes and no worries: The reason being that VM resources are much more "elastic" in their deployment and once/if they create an excaustion of address space, it will become possible to do a smoother migration to IPv6, rather than reaching a day-0 where you either get IPv6 or nothing at all. (because in the meantime any VM-based solutions will also improve, since the incentives will be so high and migration paths doable)
It won't be too long before someone suggests changing policies to no longer accept virtual machines as a justification for address space.
We all fully understand the implications. We wondered if there was already a previous explicit discussion about it (aparrently not, hm?), at policy level, exactly because of the reasons you mentioned above. But, I find the line of thinking that wants life on the Internet to be independent of its physical incarnation is genuinely forward-looking. cheers, Fotis