Enjoying the great outdoors, July 2013

Posted by Paul Braren on Jul 31 2013 in

Sometimes we all need to take a step back, and step outside, to properly enjoy the world around us. I had numerous professional and personal roadtrips and flights throughout July, and figured I'd take a moment to share some of the best of those little travel moments. The captions for each photo tell the backstory of these thoroughly enjoyable experiences.

Red’s Eats in Wiscasset Maine has amazing lobster rolls

Yes, that is an entire lobster, with tail, which is why you can barely see the roll!

Lovely little hamlet of Freeport, Maine.

Freeport’s famous L.L. Bean outlet stores are apparently open 24×7, 365 days per year. That’s like datacenter hours!

Brunswick Maine has quite the high school for such a rural area. Great place for a user group, surprisingly enough.

VTUG Summer Slam 2013′s Gritty’s “Lobstah Bake” involves Lobster. The legend is true, it really is free, and all you can eat. I dined with VMware employees, and a guy who downed 9 lobsters.

Spotted this rather interesting building going up at Cornell University. Seems their long, storied history with Microsoft has paid off, in a very good way. All sorts of glass, right near the baseball field, I might add. Probably to attract the engineering students to the ball games, just to see what’ll happen.

After all that traveling, it’s nice to have an adventure close to home as well. Just had to pick some fresh raspberries.

Yes, the countryside really is that lovely around here in the summertime, here’s a Glastonbury Connecticut snapshot of a local farm. Gives me joy just looking at it. Hope you feel it too!

References:
Red's Eats, Wiscasset Maine.
Bill and Melinda Gates Hall, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York.
Brushes with fame, how I (barely) missed Steven Sinofsky, Bill Gates, and Steve Jobs visits to a wired, well-connected Cornell University, by Paul Braren on Mon Nov 12th, 2012
Rocky Hill Ferry, Rocky Hill, Connecticut.
Rose's Berry Farm, Glastonbury, Connecticut.

Necessity to sunset SuperServer Bundles

These systems still work great for many even 9+ years later, mine included, even with (unsupported) vSphere 8 and Windows 11 Version 21H2. But unless you added the optional TPM module, it may be the end of the line as far as repurposing them for running the latest Windows 11 Version 24H2 and beyond.

After 6 successful years testing then shipping well over 1,000 Xeon D Bundles, Wiredzone had to stop SuperServer bundles in mid-2021 due to cost, supply, and logistics challenges. Bare bones system sales continued for years longer.

What's next in 2025? I don't yet have my answer for my home lab, especially now that VCF certification is required to keep non-production home lab licenses going, even as a vExpert and VMUG Advantage EVALExperience customer.

As for a SuperServer follow-on, the Xeon D-1700/2700 (Ice Lake D) was a minor refresh for 2023, with Xeon D-1800/2800 (Granite Rapids D) refresh slightly better in 2024, and hopefully Xeon 6 (Granite Rapids-D) much better in 2025 featuring PCIe Gen5, MCRDIMMs, and 100GbE networking, wow! Feb. 27 2025 update update looks promising, but pricey. Infortunately, it's become clear to me that Supermicro is less focuses on the mini-tower form factor these days.

As for the CPU industry, it's unfortunate that Pat Gelsinger was apparently ousted from Intel's helm in these challenging times, but I'm also grateful to have had the honor of working at VMware when he was the CIO there. I'll leave it at that, given the whole Broadcom thing.