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You are here: Home / Automation / Quick Tip - Using ESXi Scripted Installation (kickstart) to configure IPv6 networking

Quick Tip - Using ESXi Scripted Installation (kickstart) to configure IPv6 networking

06.21.2022 by William Lam // 5 Comments

I have written numerous articles on the topic of ESXi Scripted Installation aka Kickstart, which is just one of the many options that enables customers to fully automate the installation and configuration of their ESXi hosts. An interesting question that recently came up internally was whether you could configure ESXi networking using IPv6, rather than IPv4 using the default ESXi Kickstart network parameters?

If you look at the ESXi network params as they are labeled such as netmask, it would seem that these are only applicable to IPv4. Although my personal experience has been exclusively IPv4, I figure I would take a quick look at the python code which powers the ESXi Kickstart infrastructure which is located under /usr/lib/vmware/weasel directory. Although I am not a Developer, from what I could grok, it seems like IPv6 might actually be possible using these exact same parameters.

Using Nested ESXi and the new vSphere 7.0 Update 2 feature HTTP Boot over virtual EFI, I was able to setup a quick prototype to validate that you can indeed configure IPv6 using the same ESXi networking parameters, which are applicable to both IPv4 and IPv6.

The only difference is that for IPv6, the netmask parameter accepts a network prefix rather than a traditional netmask value. Below is a snippet from my ESXi Kickstart which demonstrates the configuration of IPv6 networking.

vmaccepteula
install --firstdisk --overwritevmfs
reboot

rootpw VMware1!
network --bootproto=static --ip=2a01:7c8:aab5:4ce::1 --netmask=48 --gateway=2a01:7c8:aab5::1 --nameserver=2a01:aaa:aaab::1 --hostname=esxi-1.primp-industries.local

If we look at the esxi_install.log, we can see that our IPv6 parameters are properly parsed by the installer.


Once the installation has completed, we can now confirm that our ESXi host has been installed and configured with an IPv6 address and IPv4 is not configured as expected.

After all these years writing about ESXi Scripted Installation, it is still cool to learn something new! I also plan to file a documentation enhancement so that our official documentation will include this information.

More from my site

  • Quick Tip - Automating ESXi local user passwords using SHA512 encrypted hashes
  • Configuring dnsmasq as PXE Server for ESXi 
  • How to prevent physical CD-ROM from ejecting after installing or upgrading ESXi?
  • Automated ESXi Installation to USB using Kickstart
  • Revisiting prompting for user input during an interactive or scripted install of ESXi

Categories // Automation, ESXi Tags // ESXi, ipv6, kickstart

Comments

  1. KW says

    06/22/2022 at 1:17 am

    Hey William, cool Quick Tip and very useful. Did you also test if it is possible to assign a IPv4 and an IPv6 Mgmt. Address to an ESXi Host via the kickstart script so that the Host is Dual Stack enabled?

    Reply
    • William Lam says

      06/22/2022 at 6:28 am

      If you're using the Kickstart "network" param, you can only setup either IPv4 or IPv6. If you want to have dual stack, then you can do IPv4 and then use ESXCLI as part of your firstboot to configure IPv6 interface or reverse, setup IPv6 initially then IPv4 afterwards.

      Reply
      • KW says

        06/23/2022 at 6:14 am

        Thank you for the Quick Tip, the Reply and show a Solution for the dual stack configuration. We will test this and check how it goes.

        Reply
      • jhg03a says

        03/31/2023 at 10:35 am

        It does get more messy though when secure boot is enabled and you can't use the firstboot section of the config. I think the only thing you can really do for dual stack at that point is host profiles or just manually setup the extra addresses.

        Reply
  2. venkat says

    07/18/2022 at 7:23 pm

    Hi William lam,

    is there a way to determine who put the hosts in maintenance mode and DRS is set to manual mode

    Reply

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Author

William Lam is a Senior Staff Solution Architect working in the VMware Cloud team within the Cloud Infrastructure Business Group (CIBG) at VMware. He focuses on Cloud Native, Automation, Integration and Operation for the VMware Cloud based Software Defined Datacenters (SDDC) across Private, Hybrid and Public Cloud

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