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Shots of the Day for 26 September 2012

Shots of the Day for 26 September 2012

Shot of the Day: 18 September 2012

2012-09-18 DSM Public Library

Quick Shot From Last Week

Just a quick shot from last week. Took a short walk around the block while at work to get some fresh air. This scene caught my eye, so I used my phone’s camera to capture it.

801 Tower

Mid-September Des Moines Farmers Market

Not too many photos this time, and I’ve done better, but here are some selections from earlier today (Sept 15, 2012). You can really tell that Fall is coming on strong by the fact that the sun is sitting lower in the sky casting shadows across the market. It made for some challenging shooting and stark contrasts between sun and shade.

As always, please visit my Flickr Set or click on each photo below to go directly to it on Flickr. Please share and enjoy these photos, and remember that they are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution, Non-Commercial, Share Alike (BY-NC-SA) license

Court House

Mickeys

New Friends

Puggin

Sharing

Yawning

14 July 2012 NASCAR Trucks at Iowa Speedway

My wife and I were very fortunate to be guests of the EverFi sponsored ThorSport #98 driven by Dakota Armstrong. I traveled light with my point-and-shoot, but still managed to get a few photos of the inspection process.

EverFi 98 Inspection 2

EverFi 98 Inspection 3

EverFi 98 Inspection 4

EverFi 98 Inspection 1

Des Moines Farmers Market, 26 May 2012

Our third Farmers’ Market of the 2012 season, and another super crowd. This was also the second annual Des Moines Flickr Friend Photowalk. Be sure to check out the other amazing photos there.

As always, please visit my Flickr Set for more photos (there are 23 in this set), or click on each photo below to go directly to it on Flickr. You can also skip straight to the slide show if you’d like. Please share and enjoy these photos, and remember that they are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution, Non-Commercial, Share Alike (BY-NC-SA) license.

MarketMoment
Perspective01
Textures03
Flower02
CrowdCandid03

Des Moines Farmers’ Market, 19 May 2012

Not too many photos this time, so they are all posted here. Please visit my Flickr Photostream or skip directly to the slideshow for my latest photos. To view larger versions on Flickr, just click an image.

As always, these photos are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution, Non-Commercial, Share Alike (BY-NC-SA) license.

The Crowd
Ready To Go
Lift Off
Bike Valet

Des Moines Farmers’ Market, 12 May 2012

Our second Farmers’ Market of the 2012 season, and another great crowd. This time, I got some wonderful photos of the talented Brocal Chords vocal group performing on the street corner. I was also able to capture several couples strolling the market.

As always, please visit my Flickr Set for more photos (there are 19 in total), or click on each photo below to go directly to it on Flickr. You can also skip straight to the slide show if you’d like. Please share and enjoy these photos, and remember that they are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution, Non-Commercial, Share Alike (BY-NC-SA) license.

Brocal Chords 03
Couple 02
Another Great Crowd
Brocal Chords 02
For a Stroll 03
Brocal Chords 10
For a Stroll 01

Des Moines Farmers Market, 5 May 2012

The 2012 Des Moines Farmers’ Market kicked off with a very large crowd this season, despite the humidity hanging in the air. As always, please feel free to skip to the Photo Set on Flickr, or the Slideshow, or click on any image to go directly to it on Flickr. Also keep in mind that these are all licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution, Noncommercial, Share Alike license. Enjoy!

Juggler Triptich Resized
More Busy Cooks
Making Mini Donuts
Good Crowd
Different Generations
Busy Cooks

20120119 VMware Users Group (VMUG) Meeting

Agenda:

  • 3PM: Check-in, Welcome, Facilities
  • 3:05: VMUG Video
  • 3:15: Fusion-io preso
  • 3:50: Break
  • 3:55 VMware vShield Security preso – Karl Fultz, VMware SE
  • 4:40: Open Discussion
  • 4:55: Drawings
  • 5:00: Break
  • 5:15: Social networking at Buffalo Wild Wings

My Notes:

  • VMUG Video
    • VMware Paul Strong, CTO, Global Customer and Field Initiatives, VMware
    • vCloud Community, 8 Certified providers
  • Fusion IO: Gus Siefker (sales) and Victor Backman (tech)
    • 4 years in business, 80,000 cards
    • Move a lot of data, fast
    • Hardware and software combo that does a minimum of 100k IOPS
    • Good for DBs, VDI density
    • VDI Design: abstracting the layers (HW, OS, App, User Data) helps prep for putting Fusion-IO in the mix.
    • Boot images and high-IOPS data go to FIO, User Data and low IOPS go to SAN storage, lower tiers.
    • Basically a block level device. Presents to host as local storage.
    • Storage is persistent, can be (if needed) moved to different servers. Gave example of one client that ships them off site rather than file transfer over Internet/WAN.
    • Nutanix Complete Block: 4 Fusion-io ioDrives = 1.3 TB fo storage.
    • Card draws about 25 W of power, but replaces lots of HD spindles.
    • Uses NAND Flash memory like an SSD, but removes the controller from the mix.
    • 15 micro second latency.
    • ioTurbine: recently acquired by Fusion-io. Allows vMotion of local storage on a Fusion-io card which normally couldn’t be vMotioned.
    • There is an ioTurbine guest driver installed on the VMs. Acts as a read cache. Writes still go to SAN.
    • Keeping up to 80% of IO local to ESXi host, and reduces read load on back end storage.
    • Lab test with F-io card and NetApp back end storage using IOmeter as the load with 8 VMs. F-io solution averaged around 12,000 IOPS once the cache “warmed” up. NetApp read ops just about nothing, so its write ops performance increased.
    • When a VM is rebooted, its cache is flushed and it needs time to re-warm.
    • Guests supported are Windows only for now. Need a driver in the guest. Linux support is “coming soon.”
    • There is also a host driver.
  • Refreshment Break
  • vShield Security Overview: Karl Fultz, VMware SE
    • Enterprise Security today is not virtualized, not cloud ready.
    • Most people are still using physical security devices.
    • Moving workloads is challenging when the security doesn’t move with it.
    • vShield moves the firewall/security into virtual appliances on the host.
    • Perimiter, Internal, and End Point security.
    • vShield Zones/vShield App are basically the same. vShield Zones included with 4.1 Enterprise Plus. Segmentation and data scanning. vShield App new stand-alone product.
      • Provides 5-tuple ruleset firewall
      • Hypervisor-level fw. Inbound, outbound connection control at vNIC level
      • Groups that can stretch as VMs migrate to other hosts.
      • Flow monitoring, policy management, logging and auditing.
    • vShield Edge is perimiter security.
      • Provides NAT, DHCP, VPN, some load balancing.
      • VLAN /Port Group isolation. PG isolation requires vDS.
      • Detailed network flow stats.
      • Policy management and logging/auditing.
    • vShield Endpoint is AV offload.
      • Offloading scanning to the Security VM. No AV agents in the guest VMs.
      • Central management.
      • Enforce remediation within the VM with the driver.
      • Trend Micro (now), McAffee (in beta now), Sophos (coming soon), Symantec (coming soon) provide endpoint appliances.
      • Windows only for guests.
    • vShiled Manager is the management plugin in vCenter.
    • vShield App with Data Security had pre-defined templates to scan environment for data loss. (DLP, agentless if you don’t count VM Tools as an “agent”). Can configure trust zones.
    • Security policies follow VMs. Allows for mixed trust zones.
    • vShield Zones is not supported in vShield Manager 5.0, must use older verson of vShield Manager to support Zones. Will need multiple managers if mixing in 5.0 vShield App/Endpoint/Edge products.
  • Q/A Time
    • I asked for clarification about vShield Zones/App:
      • Enterprise Plus 5.0 still includes Zones. App is a separate add-on product, but they are almost identical. App adds a little more granularity.
      • Zones rules are stored in vCenter db, so backup of vCenter includes backup of the rules.
      • Upgrade path from Zones to App? First time anyone has asked him. Since the rules are in vCenter db it SHOULD just work.
  • Drawing for prizes