Can’t ping guest OS from Windows XP SP3 host running VIC

ipv6pingvirtualhostvmware-esxwindows-xp

I am running VMware ESX Server 3i Version 3.5.0 and accessing this server using VMware Infrastructure Client Version 2.5.0 on a Windows XP SP3 machine. I have enabled the Microsoft TCP/IP version 6 stack and assigned an IPv6 address (using the netsh command) to the network adapter. The guest OS'es running on ESX Server (includes Win7, W2K8, WinXP) also have IPv6 addresses enabled on their adapters. The adapters are configured to be in VM Network (Bridged mode) and hence have connectivity to the Internet. The VMs are able to ping each other using IPv6 addresses and are also able to ping a physical Win7 machine using IPv6 addresses. However, the Windows XP SP3 machine on which the Client is running is not able to ping any hosts running on ESX Server while the VMs are able to ping this host. Whenever I try to ping from WXP box I get the "Invalid source route specified." error. The WinXP machine is not able to ping the Win7 physical machine too (the same error as above is thrown).

Can someone help me understand why I am receiving this error and what I need to do to resolve this error?

Thanks,
Vittal

Best Answer

The ESX Service Console and the VMKernel do not support ipv6 on ESX 3.5 so you cannot use ipv6 to manage the ESX Host using only an ipv6 network and will be unable to ping the ESX Host by name using ipv6 only (because that should resolve to Service Console addresses). If an ipv6 enabled machine (VM or otherwise) is able to ping the Service Console of an ESX 3.5 host then it must have an ipv4 stack aswell and is actually using that. If you use Ping -6 ESXHostname from one of the VM's to ping the ESX Hostname then that should not work.

Ipv6 is fully supported for any guests that support it themselves but the issues you describe seem to indicate to me that you have a problem with ipv6 in your physical environment somewhere. If you have multiple uplinks from your vSwitches and load balancing policies enabled then you might want to double check your switches and routers to be certain that you do have everything you need for ipv6 to work reliably within your environment. The fact that you can ping out from but not in to the VM's is the sort of error I would expect to see if there was a problem with the switch the ESX uplink NIC's are connected to but it could simply be an ipv6 configuration error on your Windows XP machine.

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