Internet Protocol Support in SharePoint Products and Technologies (Windows SharePoint Services)
Applies To: Windows SharePoint Services 3.0
Topic Last Modified: 2008-07-29
This topic explains the support for Internet Protocol Version 4 (IPv4) and Internet Protocol Version 6 (IPv6) addressing in SharePoint Products and Technologies.
SharePoint Products and Technologies support the following environments:
Pure IPv4 environment
Mixed IPv4 and IPv6 environment
Pure IPv6 environment
In a SharePoint Products and Technologies environment, “mixed” can be defined as one of the following likely scenarios (but there may be others):
- Both IPv4 and IPv6 protocols are running in your environment.
- Some of your client computers are using IPv4 and some of them are using IPv6.
- Your client computers are using IPv4, but the computer running Microsoft SQL Server is using IPv6.
Note
When a front-end Web server is connecting to a computer that has both IPv4 and IPv6 installed (for example, a client computer or a computer running SQL Server), the front-end Web server must have the IPv4 and IPv6 protocols installed as well.
Because SharePoint Products and Technologies support both IPv4 and IPv6, the underlying Microsoft server operating system becomes a deciding factor on what environment should be used, as follows:
Windows Server 2008: By default, the IPv6 protocol and the IPv4 protocol are both installed and enabled. When both IPv4 and IPv6 are enabled, IPv6 is given preference over IPv4. Additionally, you can remove the IPv4 protocol so that the computer runs IPv6 exclusively.
Windows Server 2003: By default, the IPv6 protocol is not installed. However, it can be added. For additional information about how to install IPv6 on a Windows Server 2003-based computer, see How to install and configure IP version 6 in Windows Server 2003 Enterprise Server (https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=123908&clcid=0x409).
To determine what version of the Internet Protocol is being used, you can use the IPConfig.exe tool. For additional information, see IPConfig (https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=122336&clcid=0x409).
The following table shows other important considerations regarding the IPv4 and IPv6 protocols.
| Product | Protocol version | Consideration |
|---|---|---|
Windows Server 2003 |
IPv4 |
You cannot uninstall the IPv4 protocol, and it is still the preferred protocol, even if IPv6 is installed. |
Windows Server 2008 |
IPv6 |
For any computer that is authenticated by using a domain server and is only running IPv6 within a SharePoint Products and Technologies environment, the domain controller must be running Windows Server 2008. This is because certain domain services in Windows Server 2003 did not support IPv6. For a mixed IPv4 and IPv6 environment, both Windows Server 2003 and Windows Server 2008 are supported. |
Microsoft SQL Server |
IPv6 |
SharePoint Product and Technologies use Microsoft SQL Server as a back-end database support. Therefore, if you need a pure IPv6 environment, you must make sure that you use a version of SQL Server 2005 or later versions. If you are installing SQL Server 2005 on Windows Server 2008, you must install SQL Server 2005 Service Pack 2 or later versions. |
Any |
IPv6 |
When in a SharePoint Products and Technologies environment, using any type of IPv6 protocol, all end-user Uniform Resource Locators (URL) must be based on DNS names with AAAA records. Browsing to SharePoint Products and Technologies URLs that use IPv6 literal address URLs is not supported. However, SharePoint Products and Technologies supports entering IPv6 literal address URLs for certain farm administration functionality, such as entering the SQL Server name when creating or attaching databases. An example of a literal address URL is http://[2001:db8:85a3:8d3:1319:8a2e:370:7344]. For server names that use a literal address format, you must enclose the literal address within square brackets. |
For additional information about IPv6, see Internet Protocol Version 6 (IPv6) (https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=120794&clcid=0x409) and IP Addressing (https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=120795&clcid=0x409).