PowerFlex 4.x How to disable IPv6 in Linux for PowerFlex 4.x MVMs

Currently PowerFlex 4.X does not support IPv6. There are plans to enable IPv6 in the future. To align the OS network stack with the supported IP protocol with PowerFlex, use this KB to ensure IPv6 is disabled. With IPv6 enabled on the MVMs, communication issues have been observed in the field with resources managed by PowerFlex Manager. Disabling IPv6 has resolved those types of issues reported. Following the below steps disable the IPv6 protocol and reduce the possibility of issues occurring.

Run the following commands on all PFMP MVMs. The commands must be ran as the root user. If you log in as "delladmin," switch to the root user account by running "sudo -s"

sed -i '/^:/d' /etc/hosts
sed -i 's/IPv6_rpfilter=yes/IPv6_rpfilter=no/g' /etc/firewalld/firewalld.conf

echo 'export JAVA_OPTS_APPEND="-Djava.net.preferIPv4Stack=true"' >>/etc/profile
echo "precedence ::ffff:0:0/96 100" >>/etc/gai.conf
echo "net.ipv6.conf.lo.disable_ipv6=1" >>/etc/sysctl.conf
echo "net.ipv6.conf.all.disable_ipv6=1" >>/etc/sysctl.conf
echo "net.ipv6.conf.default.disable_ipv6=1" >>/etc/sysctl.conf
echo "net.ipv6.conf.all.forwarding=0" >> /etc/sysctl.conf
echo "net.ipv6.conf.all.accept_redirects=0" >> /etc/sysctl.conf
echo "net.ipv6.conf.default.router_solicitations=0" >> /etc/sysctl.conf

# Run this to apply clean IPv6 disablement for all of the network adapters found on each host
for NIC in `ip link | grep UP | grep -v link | grep -v lo | grep -v \@ | cut -f2 -d\:`; do echo "net.ipv6.conf.$NIC.disable_ipv6=1" >>/etc/sysctl.conf; done

# check the sysctl configuration edits
less /etc/sysctl.conf

The MVMs require a reboot to apply the configurations made above.

Perform the steps in the following KB to gracefully drain and reboot each MVM to apply the network changes.

PowerFlex 4.x PFMP (MVM) Management Node graceful reboot procedure

Once you have gracefully rebooted all three MVMs, log in to each MVM and verify that IPv6 is disabled by running the following command. There should be no output to the terminal:

ip -6 a