Configuring IPv6 on ESX 4.0.x

This article provides steps to configure IPv6 on ESX 4.0.

ESX 3.5 supports virtual machines configured for IPv6.
ESX 4.0 supports IPv6 with the following restrictions:
- IPv6 Storage (software iSCSI and NFS) is experimental in ESX 4.0.
- ESX does not support TCP Segmentation Offload (TSO) with IPv6.
- VMware High Availability and Fault Tolerance do not support IPv6.

Guest operating systems

Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008 fully support IPv6.
Windows 2003 SP1 and Windows XP SP2 have the infrastructure for IPv6, but components of the system and applications are not fully compliant.
Linux version 2.6 is fully compliant.

IPv6 is disabled by default and must be enabled.

Note: Enabling IPv6 on an ESX host does not disable IPv4.

To enable IPv6 from the GUI:

To enable IPv6 using a command line:

To create or edit a virtual adapter (vswif for the Service Console or vmknic for the VMkernel):

Click Host > Configuration tab > Networking > Properties.
In the window that displays, select Internet Protocol Version 6.
Click OK.
There are 3 ways to assign an IPv6 address to an adapter:
- Use DHCPv6. For more information about DHCPv6,
- If you have a host that advertises IPv6 configuration directives (such as an IPv6 router or a host running radvd), use the IPv6 automatic configuration feature.
- Statically assigned. An automatically generated Link-Local IP address is assigned to communicate with potential routers in the same link.

To edit IPv6 addresses assigned to Service Console or VMkernel adapters:

Click Host > Configuration tab > Networking.
Select Virtual Switch or Distributed Virtual Switch and edit the interface.

Based on VMware KB 1010812

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