Does gcp allow vm to have internal or external IPv6 address to vm instances

Question

When I log onto vm in shell. I can find addresses of vm to have both ipv4 and ipv6 addresses. But I am unable to use IPv6 address within the same network to ping onto the vm. I had a question that does GCP block these

Answer 1

Google Cloud Platform allows users to connect to Global Load Balancer (this has external IP) using IPv6 but VPC Network DO NOT support IPv6 .

This article explains how GCP Global Load balancer allows IPv6 connection and then proxies to VM instances using IPv4.

Note from the GCP Documentation

VPC networks only support IPv4 unicast traffic. They do not support broadcast, multicast, or IPv6 traffic within the network; VMs in the VPC network can only send to IPv4 destinations and only receive traffic from IPv4 sources. However, it is possible to create an IPv6 address for a global load balancer.

So, you can connect to GCP Instances using IPv6 over public internet (external IP) and VM instances DO Not have internal IPv6 IP.

Answer 2

Google cloud now supports external ipv6 on VM instances. Each instance can get a /96 external ip range and it can be used to access internet (without NAT) or be used for VM to VM traffic.

At this moment (July 2021) it's only supported limited regions:

• asia-east1
• asia-south1
• europe-west2
• us-west2

See more detailed in

https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/ip-addresses/configure-ipv6-address https://cloud.google.com/vpc/docs/vpc#ipv6-addresses