IPv6 - Wrong Attitude Guys

[Zeon]

Hi All,
I was reading through my backed up email and saw the Veeam forum digest with a note from Gostev. I really wanted to point out a poor attitude here:

While this bug is off the table, there is another newly discovered issue which we are seeing a lot with the customers who have upgraded to ESXi 6.0. Fortunately, this one is environmental-specific and has a workaround that should work for majority of users. The issue causes jobs using Direct SAN access mode to crash on backup proxies with a large amount of NIC adapters having IPv6 enabled. The actual fault sits in one of the VDDK 6.0 libraries, in the function that collects DNS addresses from all proxy NICs, and puts them into a string. When string's length becomes larger than certain amount of characters, VDDK crashes. As you can probably guess by now, the main issue here is IPv6 address length. For example, in our own lab VDDK does not have any issues with a backup proxy having 10 IPv4-only adapters does not have any issues, however it crashes on a backup proxy with a single IPv4 adapter and 7 IPv6 adapters.

Obviously, aside of removing some of the unused network interfaces, the easiest workaround is to simply go into each NIC's properties, and disable IPv6 – which is enabled by default on every network connection, but rarely actually used - outside perhaps huge telecoms and service providers. We are also testing the code that patches the faulty VDDK function, and if all is well, this will be available momentarily as a hot fix for customers who cannot disable IPv6. Also, due to how wide spread the issue is – over 50 support cases as of end of last week – we are now considering releasing the new Update 2 build (U2a) with the fix embedded. This will also give us a chance to address a few other, less wide-spread U2 support issues. I will keep you posted regarding this newer build.

You can't go and put your heads under the sand with IPv6 rollout Veeam/Gostev. Perhaps in your home base of North America you have plenty of IPv4 space but here in Asia Pacific (APNIC), IPv4 address space is extremely hard to get now. Our whole company has transitioned to using a dual stack IPv6/IPv4 network with virtually everything (other than Veeam, an old VOIP system and Ubiquiti equipment) running native IPv6 and IPv4 being mainly for the none-IPv6 enabled internet. 98% of our network traffic is now IPv6 if you discount Veeam.

I have seen a similar attitude from Ubiqiuti and it was only recently that our mail server (Smartermail) was enabled for IPv6. It seems that many of these North American software companies are oblivious to the fact IPv4 exhaustion is here. Parts of the world and many companies in South East Asia have already enabled IPv6.

This problems hasn't had any effect on us but I really dislike this "throw away" attitude of disabling IPv6 to fix poorly implemented/tested software. While I realise this is a VMware rather than Veeam fault - suggesting disabling is not the right approach guys!

[VladV]

The issue lies with vddk and not the backup software. They are simply providing a workaround for something introduced by vmware with vSphere 6. If you read Gostev's post, you would have seen that a permanent fix is in the works and is also scheduled to be included in a patch.

So, what attitude are you pointing to? Or you would have preferred they release the fix without pointing to a workaround until then?

[nielsengelen]

Do keep in mind that we already released Update 2a which contains this fix as described.

IPv4 is still the most used in 90% of the companies and therefor it's easier to disable IPv6 but as the digest says we also take care for those who can't disable it by providing a hotfix (now in Update 2).

Another side note is that Veeam is not a US company

[vmexpert]

This problems hasn't had any effect on us but I really dislike this "throw away" attitude of disabling IPv6 to fix poorly implemented/tested software. While I realise this is a VMware rather than Veeam fault - suggesting disabling is not the right approach guys!

You should read more carefully what you are quoting before picking it apart Gostev explains a temporary workaround, adding that the permanent fix for those who cannot disable IPv6 is in the works. I really don't see how his statements can be understood otherwise?

[dellock6]

Also, the case is related to Veeam proxies, which I do hope are not using public IP addresses but private ones, so I don't really see the problem in lack of public IPv4 addresses when we are consuming one more internal/private public IP address...

[Zeon]

To be honest it's more about the general attitude that "oh IPv6 is something that can be turned off to fix X". I've run into that with so many vendors - especially those providing specialist equipment it really has become a breaking point for my patience!

I am just wanting to raise awareness about the general attitude - IPv6 can't be thought of in that way anymore. I appreciate its a workaround in the short term which is fair enough. But without people voicing up about this people may still consider it OK to simply say "disable IPv6".

More a post of frustration after dealing with a specialist scanner that has bugs due to IPv6 being enabled with a vendor who had hardly even heard of IPv6....

[dellock6]

Understood, and I agree to a point, but as others have explained, it's a workaround to an issue created by VDDK, that is "not" our component

[boatmn810]

Just checking to see if IPV6 is completely supported in all dialog boxes for 9.5 Update 1 as nobody can answer me when calling in.

They reference these posts, which are over a year old.

[bpr-backup]

I will confirm, as when I created a support ticket, they asked to make sure i was not running IPv6 to fix a connection problem to our offsite backup repository.We use 9.5 U1. Well, the back-haul to our private cloud is pure-IPv6 and won't work.

I too am not keen on the attitude I have seen posted here from the green names. It should be noted that Facebook has gone full IPv6 internally 50% of their datacenter clusters are IPv6 only, and Microsoft is transitioning to IPv6, neither using a dual stack, IPv6 only.

(sidenote, it's cool that MS is testing and transitioning to Pure IPv6, as they are dicovering issues in some parts of their IPv6 stack. Those are being fixed