Advanced Networking

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The following topics guide you through advanced networking in an ESX environment, and how to set up and change advanced networking configuration options.

This chapter includes the following topics:

n“Internet Protocol Version 6,” on page 45

n“VLAN Configuration,” on page 46

n“Networking Policies,” on page 46

n“Change the DNS and Routing Configuration,” on page 60

n“MAC Addresses,” on page 61

n“TCP Segmentation Offload and Jumbo Frames,” on page 62

n“NetQueue and Networking Performance,” on page 65

n“VMDirectPath I/O,” on page 66

Internet Protocol Version 6

vSphere supports both Internet Protocol version 4 (IPv4) and Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6) environments.

The Internet Engineering Task Force has designated IPv6 as the successor to IPv4. The adoption of IPv6, both as a standalone protocol and in a mixed environment with IPv4, is rapidly increasing. With IPv6, you can use vSphere features in an IPv6 environment.

A major difference between IPv4 and IPv6 is address length. IPv6 uses a 128-bit address rather than the 32-bit addresses used by IPv4. This helps alleviate the problem of address exhaustion that is present with IPv4 and eliminates the need for network address translation (NAT). Other notable differences include link-local addresses that appear as the interface is initialized, addresses that are set by router advertisements, and the ability to have multiple IPv6 addresses on an interface.

An IPv6-specific configuration in vSphere involves providing IPv6 addresses, either by entering static addresses or by using an automatic address configuration scheme for all relevant vSphere networking interfaces.

Enable IPv6 Support on an ESX Host

You can enable or disable IPv6 support on the host. IPv6 is disabled by default.

Procedure

1 Click the arrow next to the Inventory button in the navigation bar and select Hosts and Clusters.

2Select the host and click the Configuration tab.

VMware, Inc.

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