Does VMWare Fusion suport IPv6 virtual networking?

[jesmith18]

I need to support testing of an F5 LTM VE on both IPv4 & IPv6 concurrently.

Does VMWare Fusion suport IPv6 virtual networking?

I know that VMWare Fusion supports bridging to an IPv6 host network. But I need it support an IPv6 virtual network so that VMs can be configured to talk using IPv6.

Thanks,

[Ivan Ivanov]

In NAT mode VMs can be auto-configured with IPv6 addresses and they can talk to each other using IPv6. Talking to the host via IPv6 should happen using the host's physical IPv6 address.

[jesmith18]

Hi,

I've configured a virtual network for IPv6 attached it to the network adapter of a VM and I've assigned IPv6 addresses to both the interface on the VM and the interface for this network on the host.

When I ping6 from the host to the VM, it is not receiving any traffic

Any ideas?

[Ivan Ivanov]

The host interface you are talking about should be the 'bridgeXXX' interface created for the corresponding virtual network, right? In theory if the bridgeXXX interface is configured with an IPv6 address with the same prefix as the vmnet (e. g. for vmnet2 the default prefix should be fd15:4b5a:a52b:1002:/64, so the host address could be fd15:4b5a:a52b:1002::1), then there should be direct connectivity between the host and the VM. This is working as expected for IPv4 (for the same bridgeXXX interface on the host and the same virtual interface attached to the VM), but not for IPv6. We have filed a report to Apple about this behaviour but no update yet.

For the opposite direction (from the VM to the host) using an IPv6 address assigned to the host interface (with a different prefix than the subnet) would cause the traffic to pass through the router and reach the specified interface, but for the inbound direction unfortunately I don't have a good idea other than using IPv4.

[hardik7979]

Any updates on this?

[Ivan Ivanov]

Apple have fixed an issue on their side in Monterey, IIRC in macOS 12.3 update.

[JayDoran]

I know this is an old thread, but I'm curious if this actually did get fixed at all? I'm running MacOS 13.1 with Fusion 12.2.4, and I'm not able to get IPv6 communication between my Mac and a VM.

I have vnet3 (bridge101) configured to allow NAT with IPv6 enabled and prefix fdef:1111::/64.

My VM I configured with the IPv6 address fdef:1111::131

Since I didn't see any IPv6 address on the bridge101 interface, I added the address fdef:1111::22 to it.

When I try to ping6 it, I just get:

PING6(56=40+8+8 bytes) fdef:1111::22 --> fdef:1111::53
ping6: sendmsg: No buffer space available
ping6: wrote fdef:1111::53 16 chars, ret=-1

I'm not sure if there's still issues on Apple's OS side, or if I'm missing something.

Thanks.

[Technogeezer]

Ive been working with Fusion 13 (Apple Silicon) with a Windows 11 ARM VM configured with a custom NAT network that's IPV6 enabled.

I've successfully pinged outbound from the VM residing in the NAT network to the IPV6 address of my active network adapter.

Trying to get from the Mac to the VM proved a bit trickier (I freely admit I'm a noob on IPV6).

I was able to finally get the ping to work from the Mac to the VM using the following variants of ping6. This assumes that the Mac host is configured to have an address on the NAT network, and no port forwarding is done via NAT.

ping6 -I bridge102 fe80::537e:ef38:47d6:1c93
ping6 fe80::537e:ef38:47d6:1c93%bridge102

where bridge102 is the bridge corresponding to my custom NAT network, and fe80::537e:ef38:47d6:1c93 is the link-local address of the VM on the NAT network (obtained through ifconfig in the Windows guest). Both of these seem to force the ping to go over the bridge connected directly on the NAT subnet.

I could not get this to work otherwise. I would get "no route to host" or I would find ping just sitting there and reporting packet failures. It's probably due to the IPV6 routing tables in the host (as I admit as well I don't have a lot of experience with).