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Disable IPv6 in ESXi Kickstart without additional reboot

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ESXi supports dual stack networking (IPv4 and IPv6) by default, however users can also configure just IPv4 or IPv6, which requires a system reboot for the changes to go into effect.

Recently, I received a question from a colleague asking if there was a way to disable IPv6 during ESXi Kickstart (aka scripted installation) but NOT require an additional reboot as this setting is typically added in the %post or %firstboot section, which will require an additional reboot due to changing the networking stack default.

The solution was actually quite simple by just leveraging the %pre section, which would ensure that IPv6 is disabled upon the initial reboot after the ESXi installation.

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Automated VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) host commission using ESXi Kickstart

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ESXi Scripted Installation (Kickstart) has been my go-to method for achieving zero-touch provisioning of ESXi hosts at scale, which I had started using back in the ESX 2.5 days when I was a customer! Having worked at some very larger enterprises, I got the opportunity to experience and manage a variety of environments for automated ESXi provisioning.

For more than a decade, I have written hundreds of articles about ESXi kickstart and how it can help solve a variety of use cases stemming from my own background to some of the unique requirements that have come up from some of our largest VMware customers. To date, some of my favorite ESXi kickstart solutions includes my 2014 blog post in automating VM deployments using a USB device which became the basis for my USB to SDDC project in 2017.

While playing with the latest VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 5.1 Holodeck release (currently in Beta), I was thinking about the current VCF host commissioning workflow, which is a multi-step process after an ESXi host has been provisioned where you need to manually (or using automation) to add the hosts to SDDC Manager before they can be consumed for either expanding and/or deploying a new workload domain.

I thought, why could we not just skip this step all together and that was when I had the idea of just incorporating the VCF host commissioning workflow automatically as part of an ESXi Kickstart installation! 😀

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Automated ESXi Installation with a USB Network Adapter using Kickstart

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I have been working with the Project Keswick team for quite some time now, which is an OCTO project is lead by my good friend Alan Renouf, who is doing some really innovative work with ESXi at the edge and application deployment using a desired state engine.

Recently I had met with the team to discuss some of the options for their automated deployment which uses the tried and true ESXi scripted installation aka ESXi Kickstart. One thing that I had shared was just how powerful the %pre section within the kickstart is and can be used to redefine or update the original kickstart based on your installation criteria. For example, you could pull down external configuration files and determine at runtime to decide how you want to configure your networking to even fully bootstrapping a local vSAN datastore and this would all happen prior to ESXi installer starting. I have used the %pre section numerous times as a customer and also demonstrated in my USB-to-SDDC project which has also been an inspiration for the Project Keswick team.

One very cool capability that Project Keswick is enabling is the integration of the popular USB Network Native Driver for ESXi and one challenge they had faced with automating an ESXi installation when only a USB network adapter was available is additional configuration that must be setup before the installer can begin. They shared their solution and thought this would be a good blog post topic, especially as I know many folks use the USB Network Native Driver for ESXi in their homelab and if you wish to automate the installation, the solution shared from the team could help.

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