With the emerging utility of IPv6 in traditional networks, web applications are adapting to support IPv4 and IPv6 requests. The network infrastructure is expected to process client requests originating from IPv4 or IPv6 based devices. Server clustering with server load balancing has emerged as a promising technique to build scalable web servers.

The NSX Advanced Load Balancer provides full IPv6 and dual-stack IPv4 and IPv6 connectivity to the load balancing network without relying on any tunneling solutions. See the following figure for generic use cases for IPv6 support.



Ecosystem Integration

IPv6 is supported on baremetal, VMware vCenter, Linux server cloud, CSP, and OpenStack clouds. For more details on ecosystem, see Preparing the Installation topic in VMware NSX Advanced Load BalancerInstallation guide.

Feature Documentation

Sl.No.

Feature

Comments

1

Auto Gateway

Auto Gateway is supported for IPv6 clients.

2

BGP

Currently, the following features are supported:

  • Pure IPv6 and dual-stack BGP peering.

  • Advertising IPv6 BGP virtual service over IPv6 and dual-stack peer.

  • Advertising IPv6 BGP virtual service over IPv4 and dual-stack peers.

  • Advertising dual-stack virtual service over dual-stack peers only.

Supported on Bare-Metal and VMware no-access clouds.

3

DHCP

DHCP, DHCPv6, and static addressing (SLAAC) are supported on VMware and OpenStack clouds.

4

DNS

Sending statically configured A or AAAA records over both IPv4 and IPv6 transports are supported.

5

Health Monitor

ICMP, ICMPv6, TCP, TCPv6, UDP, UDPv6, HTTP(s) health monitors and external health monitors are supported.

6

Infra-IPAM-Internal-IPAM

IPv6 IP allocation and VIP modification for dual-stack are supported on NSX Advanced Load Balancer internal IPAM.

Network manager supports VIP and pool server changes in IPv6 networks.

7

IPAM and DNS

IPv6 unified IPAM logic changes to call cloud connector APIs and NSX Advanced Load Balancer DNS AAAA record are supported.

IPAM for the following VIP types are supported:

  • IPv4 only

  • IPv6 only

  • IPv4 + IPv6 (dual-stack)

8

Layer 4 and Layer 7 VIP

The following network profiles are supported:

  • System-HTTP

  • System-HTTPS

  • System-L4-Application

  • System-DNS

  • System-L4-SSL

Configuring pure IPv6 virtual service and dual-stack virtual service is supported.

Configuring IPv6 servers and pools with a combination of IPv4 and IPv6 servers is supported.

TCP-Fast-Path is not supported in the System-L4-Application profile.

9

Layer 7 Policies

HTTP policy engine handles both IPv4 and IPv6 addresses.

10

Network Security Policies

Layer 4 UDP, Layer 4 TCP, and Layer 7 virtual services are supported for network security policy.

11

Packet Capture

Virtual service and SE packet captures are supported.

12

Persistence

Client-IP based persistence for all application profiles and cookies and TLS based persistence are supported.

13

Port Channel and VLAN

Port channel and VLAN are supported on baremetal.

14

Scale out

Native Layer 2 scale out with MACinMAC and IP encapsulation and virtual service heartbeats and flow-probes are also supported.

15

WAF

WAF policy supports both IPv4 and IPv6 addresses.

16

XFF and Connection Multiplexing

X-Forwarded-For and connection multiplexing are supported for System-HTTP.
Note:

IPv6 Controller should be deployed with a Global unicast IPv6 address if the Controller is accessible across the network.

Configuring Controllers with unique local addresses (ULA) will not program the default gateway address, resulting in external networks that are not reachable by default from Controllers.