When you’re building a Cisco home lab, make sure to buy switches and/or routers that will satisfy the requirements of the track you’re currently studying for. You may also want to future proof your home lab for other Cisco tracks. Future proofing was one of the reasons why I didn’t buy 1841 for my lab and bought 2801 instead. 1841s will not satisfy the requirements of Voice track, which is one of the Cisco tracks that I would like to learn more about. Anyway, CCNP R&S (Routing and Switching) and CCIE R&S requires you to know IPv6. While CCNP does not specifically require to run IPv6 on 3560, it will most likely be used in the CCIE lab exam. I do know that INE materials require you to enable IPv6 on Catalyst 3560 to practice and master the topic.
By default, Catalyst 3560s does not allow you to turn on IPv6 without changing SDM (Switching Database Manager). I did not know this before, so when I tried it on my Catalyst 3560, I got the following:
3560(config)#ipv6 ? % Unrecognized command
I wasn’t expecting that error, so I went to Cisco’s website and started practicing on how to use Cisco DOC CD – only resource during the CCIE lab exam. Luckily, I was able to find the instructions on how to do it. But, if you want more information then please visit this configuration guide.
Without further ado, here’s a tutorial on how to enable IPv6 on Catalyst 3560.
3560(config)#sdm prefer dual-ipv4-and-ipv6 default Changes to the running SDM preferences have been stored, but cannot take effect until the next reload. Use 'show sdm prefer' to see what SDM preference is currently active. 3560(config)#do wr mem Building configuration... [OK] 3560#reload
To verify that SDM has been changed:
3560#sho sdm prefer The current template is "desktop IPv4 and IPv6 default" template. The selected template optimizes the resources in the switch to support this level of features for 8 routed interfaces and 1024 VLANs. number of unicast mac addresses: 2K number of IPv4 IGMP groups + multicast routes: 1K number of IPv4 unicast routes: 3K number of directly-connected IPv4 hosts: 2K number of indirect IPv4 routes: 1K number of IPv6 multicast groups: 1K number of directly-connected IPv6 addresses: 2K number of indirect IPv6 unicast routes: 1K number of IPv4 policy based routing aces: 0 number of IPv4/MAC qos aces: 0.5K number of IPv4/MAC security aces: 1K number of IPv6 policy based routing aces: 0 number of IPv6 qos aces: 0.5K number of IPv6 security aces: 0.5K
To verify that IPv6 can now be issued:
3560(config)#ipv6 ? access-list Configure access lists cef Cisco Express Forwarding for IPv6 dhcp Configure IPv6 DHCP general-prefix Configure a general IPv6 prefix hop-limit Configure hop count limit host Configure static hostnames icmp Configure ICMP parameters local Specify local options mld Global MLD Snooping enable for Catalyst Vlans neighbor Neighbor prefix-list Build a prefix list route Configure static routes router Enable an IPV6 routing process source-route Process packets with source routing header options unicast-routing Enable unicast routing
To enable IPv6, issue the command below:
3560(config)#ipv6 unicast-routing
It is pretty easy to configure, but if you didn’t know anything about SDM, then you’re probably going to blame the IOS version that is installed, I certainly did.
I hope this helps and thank you for reading!
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