I’m not sure VMware has officially announced it yet but public voting for VMworld session submissions is now open. I haven’t seen any tweets on it from the @VMworld account and the main VMworld web page doesn’t mention it yet but the Content Catalog is now live and after some poking around I found the Vote for Sessions link on the VMworld site on the Learning drop down tab. The link basically just takes you to the Content Catalog which I posted about yesterday, but you can vote on your favorite sessions if you login to the site.

Public voting for VMworld sessions will be open from May 3rd – May 24th at 11:59pm PST. The public voting is just one part of a whole scoring process that includes also content committee voting and sponsor voting. VMware reserves a small chunk of session slots (5%) that they call Customer Choice that can make it in via the public voting, the remainder of the session slots typically are filled up by VMware sessions, sponsor sessions and sessions that score favorably through the content committee voting.

[important]I’d greatly appreciate your vote for my submission which is a session on VVols with lots of new and updated information that is the sequel to the session that I presented last year at VMworld. Simply search on my last name (Siebert) or session ID (7925) to find it.[/important]

You can vote on as many sessions as you want, since the list is so large (1,575) you are better of searching or filtering it on topics that interest you. You can only cast one vote for a session though. To vote on sessions do the following:

Go to the VMworld home page and click login at the top of the page.

If you don’t have an existing VMworld account, still click the login link but at the login page click Create Account. You’ll need to enter some basic required information (username, email, address info) and then an account will be created for you.

Once you’re logged in select the Learning tab on the page and select the Vote on Public Sessions link.

On the Public Sessions page click the link to vote and you’ll be re-directed to the Content Catalog.

Once you are at the Content Catalog you will see the fill list of sessions, enter a search term (i.e. speaker name, VVols, VSAN, etc.) or select filters from the left side (track/sub-track/type). Once you find a session you want to vote on simply click the star at the end of the session name and it will turn yellow and that’s it, your vote is in for that session, repeat for any other sessions you want to vote on.

The session catalog for VMworld 2016 just appeared online, my google search filter on VVols picked it up and alerted me. I’m not sure if that was intentional or not on VMware’s part but they might be getting ready for the public voting process that is part of the session scoring that determines which sessions are approved or denied. Right now there are 1,575 sessions listed in the catalog as shown below:

A quick search on my favorite topic, VVols, reveals 18 sessions including my own submission (7925):

June 14th is when notifications are made to session owners, so I imagine the public voting will begin next week and run for several weeks. Of those 1,575 submissions there are probably only a couple hundred that will make it so be sure and get your votes in once the voting goes live.

The Denver UserCon is on Thursday, May 26th this year from 8:00am-5:00pm in downtown Denver at the Hyatt Regency located at 650 15th Street. This will be my first Denver UserCon in a few years after returning from living in Phoenix for 2 years. As a former Denver VMUG Leader I’ve watched this one mature over the years and grow larger. I actually organized an event of this nature before the UserCon’s existed back in 2010, I called it a Super VMUG and had Scott Lowe, Doug Hazelman and Rob Randall all speaking along with several other vendors.

This year you’ll get to see a trio of Top bloggers and vExperts at the Denver UserCon with Scott Lowe leading off with the morning keynote on NSX, followed by Chris Wahl doing the lunch keynote on tech skills (I saw this in Silicon Valley and it was great) and myself batting clean-up with a session on VVols right after the lunch keynote.

So if you are in the Denver area put this on your calendar and go register for it. I’ll also be at the HPE Booth so stop by and say hi. And as we just lost another long-time Denver VMUG leader, Kevin Divine, who packed up and moved to Minnesota if you are interested in being a Denver VMUG leader be sure and reach out to the VMUG staff.

Gina Minks from Dell/EMC recently wrote up a post on her site as a reaction to a tweet of mine alleging that I (and apparently others) ignore female vBloggers. I can assure you that this is simply not true and as a matter of fact I ignore both male and female bloggers equally. What I mean by that is I really don’t have the time to constantly search for new bloggers that might be not listed on my vLaunchpad blog list. Bloggers come and go constantly and right now I maintain almost 500 blogs on my blog list. Between a day job, maintaining 3 websites, link collecting and blogging I rarely have time to even relax these days.

What I rely on to keep my vLaunchpad up to date is you coming to me and telling me you are not listed and need to be added. I typically add 40-50 new blogs a year to my site and do it in periodic batches as cutting and pasting table cells up and down to keep everything alphabetized is a lot of work. The reality is only a few female bloggers took the initiative and filled out the simple form to get added, Jane Rimmer, Amy Manley and Melissa Palmer, in fact Melissa was the overwhelming favorite in the New blog category last year and placed in the top 50.

Concerning female vBloggers this year I had a new category nomination in my Top vBlog voting for Favorite Female Blogger. Again this is all self-nomination as I can’t possibly keep track of who’s male, who’s female, who’s independent, who’s new, etc. I only had 2 nominations so I didn’t add the category to the final ballot. That was a bit disappointing as I was hoping there would be more, I even tweeted the below out hoping to attract more:

The bottom line is female vBloggers I’m not ignoring you, I just don’t have the time to search for you or any other blogger for that matter. I would love to have more female vBloggers on my list, so if you’re out there and your blog is related to virtualization simply use this form and I’ll get you added and hopefully next year we’ll have a much better response in that voting category. You can read my full response to Gina’s post here.

I recently was involved in an issue where error messages where being generated in the vmkernel.log and found out the cause was related to the maximum LUNs being increased in vSphere 6 from 255 to 1024. The error messages themselves were related to the fact that our Protocol Endpoint (PE) for VVols is advertised as LUN 256 and with a recent change in 6.0U2 related to PDL assessment a LUN that returns unexpected output upon query causes the error messages similar to below from a VMTN thread:

2016-04-05T14:27:05.577Z cpu6:33386)WARNING: NMP: nmp_PathDetermineFailure:2973: Cmd (0x28) PDL error (0x5/0x25/0x0) – path vmhba2:C0:T2:L256 device naa.2ff70002ac014e9d – triggering path failover

2016-04-05T14:27:05.577Z cpu6:33386)WARNING: NMP: nmpCompleteRetryForPath:382: Logical device “naa.2ff70002ac014e9d”: awaiting fast path state update before retrying failed command again…

2016-04-05T14:27:06.577Z cpu9:57333)WARNING: NMP: nmpDeviceAttemptFailover:603: Retry world failover device “naa.2ff70002ac014e9d” – issuing command 0x43a5cc84e400

2016-04-05T14:27:06.577Z cpu6:33386)WARNING: NMP: nmpCompleteRetryForPath:352: Retry cmd 0x28 (0x43a5cc84e400) to dev “naa.2ff70002ac014e9d” failed on path “vmhba2:C0:T3:L256” H:0x0 D:0x2 P:0x0 Valid sense data: 0x5 0x25 0x0.

2016-04-05T14:27:06.577Z cpu6:33386)WARNING: NMP: nmp_PathDetermineFailure:2973: Cmd (0x28) PDL error (0x5/0x25/0x0) – path vmhba2:C0:T3:L256 device naa.2ff70002ac014e9d – triggering path failover

Note the L256 in the above path that is related to LUN 256 (Protocol Endpoint) which is not a traditional LUN in the sense as it has no storage allocated to it and serves as an administrative LUN (LU_CONG) to access VVol sub-LUNs. Here’s some detail on the PDL change in vSphere 6.0 U2 and subsequent errors that it may cause:

[important]

New Issue ESXi 6.0 Update 2 hosts connected to certain storage arrays with a particular version of the firmware might see I/O timeouts and subsequent aborts When ESXi 6.0 Update 2 hosts connected to certain storage arrays with a particular version of the firmware send requests for SMART data to the storage array, and if the array responds with a PDL error, the PDL response behavior in 6.0 update 2 might result in a condition where these failed commands are continuously retried thereby blocking other commands. This error results in widespread I/O timeouts and subsequent aborts.

Also, the ESXi hosts might take a long time to reconnect to the vCenter Server after reboot or the hosts might go into a Not Responding state in the vCenter Server. Storage-related tasks such as HBA rescan might take a very long time to complete.

Workaround: To resolve this issue, see Knowledge Base article 2133286.

[/important]

The solution to eliminate these errors seems to be to change Disk.MaxLUN parameter on your ESXi Hosts to 255 for or below as this KB article outlines. Note the KB article confirms the change in max LUNs to 1024 in vSphere 6.0. But also note that this change just impacts the LUN numbering as the max supported SCSI devices remains at 256, so essentially you can have LUNs numbered higher than 255 now but you are still limited to 256 total LUNs per host as documented in the vSphere 6.0 maximum configs doc.

VMware doesn’t do public betas that often, they did one with the initial release of VSAN and now they are doing one with the next release of vSphere. In my opinion public betas are a good thing as it helps ensure an overall better GA release as more people are offering feedback, constructive criticism and helping to uncover any bugs that may exist in the beta code. As a reward to the people who participate in the public beta you get to be part of the secret club and get an early preview of all the cool stuff coming in the next vSphere release. So if you are interested in participating VMware has a form you can fill out for consideration to be one of the chosen ones.

Be realistic when considering to sign-up for the beta, if you know you won’t have the time that is expected to participate and offer feedback then don’t sign-up. VMware is looking for your assistance, those who just want to see what’s new in the beta are really not of any value to VMware. The target audience are customers who have deployed vSphere 5.5 and 6.0 in a portion of their environment. Participants are expected to:

In my last post on how we can make VMUG events better the topic of having customers present came up and it seemed that the barriers to this were both finding customers and more importantly finding customers that were not afraid of public speaking that would be willing to present. I did a post about 2 years ago on my tips for overcoming public speaking as I was that same person, a customer who was an basically an introvert with no public speaking experience at all who conquered that fear. You can read my tips as I reflected on my experience in this post and while you are at it another related post is on 10 ways to ruin a presentation.