ESXI 6.5U1 Onboard NICs Dissapears after disabling IPv6

[TOM_CFFP]

Have had this happen twice with vastly different systems.

First: Cisco UCS 220 M3,  Dual onboard 1gb NICs.  Both plugged in.,  Quad Intel 710 SFP+ NIC, 2 plugged in.

Second: Dell R610, Quad onboard 1gb NICs, 2 plugged in,  Quad Intel 710 SFP+ NIC, 2 plugged in.

All onboard and 10gb nic ports are visible after clean install.  I select an onboard NIC for management port, then disable IPV6 and reboot.

When the system returns, any onboard nic that was shown as "Connected" is no longer showing.

When I reinstall the OS, it still doesn't show the NICs.  (Don't think its wiping the config).  So I kill the partition and force a clean install and the NICs appear again, until I turn off IPv6.

Only way I've solved this, I deleted the /etc/vmware/esxi.conf file.  Then had to restore network settings on next boot.  Now all the NICs show, and the IPv6 is still disabled.

Has anyone else found a better workaround?

Thanks,

[daphnissov · Accepted solution]

Not a workaround per se but more a valid reason to keep IPv6 enabled on ESXi 6.5U1 which is called out specifically in the release notes:

An ESXi host might fail with purple screen when you turn off the IPv6 support

An ESXi host might fail with purple screen when you turn off globally the IPv6 support and reboot the host.