vSphere Netstack Configuration (quick notes)

by Abdullah · Published March 25, 2017 · Updated June 1, 2017

Although this feature has been there since quite sometime, I was asked a question about it something related to it by a colleague at work and I had to check it! (My mind is an open platform for human SQL injections :-P when someone asks a question nothing returns back to normal until it is answered because I need to know now lol).

So I won’t delve into the installation specifics as there are a lot of online content that will answer that, on the other hand I will point out to a couple of things that I have noticed (my current setup is at vSphere 6.5):

You cannot change the TCP/IP netstack when creating a VMKernel adapter via the VDS wizard and this cannot be modified later because once you select a netstack it sticks.
The netstack can only be selected when adding the VMKernel adapter via the host’s network configuration pane.
Now lets say you no longer want to use a defined routing for a the vMotion netstack configuration, presumably by editing the vMotion netstack and going to routing configuration and by just removing that route and applying things should be cleared! Nope they don’t :-D, after you hit okay everything remains the same.
I thought maybe because the vMotion netstack had adapters relying on it and as such the routing configuration cannot be removed, so I deleted the VMKernel adapter and went to clear the configuration yet the routing form was dimmed and cannot be edited.
So how to get out of this? Two things that must be done:
1. First you have to remove the VMKernel adapter.
2. Second, I found that via CLI if you remove the vMotion netstack it doesn’t delete the vMotion netstack it just resets its configuration %), after going through the first step SSH to each ESXi host and issue this command: esxcli network ip netstack remove -N vMotion or –netstack=vMotion (case sensitive) an error will show but the configuration of that netstack including the routing will be cleared out.