Fourth time lucky! Writing takes quite a bit of personal commitment and dedication, but it also takes a lot of support. Taking up such a project would not be possible without help from family, friends, and colleagues. I would like to thank my wife, Lisa, for her continued help and for simply keeping everything together, and my children for being especially patient while I worked.

A special thanks go to the editors at Packt Publishing (huge thanks goes to Rahul Nair, Mehvash Fatima, Nirant Carvalho, and Narsimha Pai) for taking this project and making it a reality.

My co-author (Charbel Nemnom) for giving me the opportunity to write with him. As part of this book project, I got the opportunity to write about features that I had not had the opportunity to dive deeply into, and so I also got the opportunity to go and develop my own skills as part of the process.

Finally, I would like to thank a number of people for helping me along the way: Ben Armstrong, Rob Hindman, Lars Iwer, Kathy Davies, Catherine Watson, Subhasish Bhattacharya, Patrick Lang, Jim Wooldridge, and Matt McSpirit.

Charbel Nemnom is a Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) for Cloud and Datacenter Management (CDM) and a Technical Evangelist for 5nine Software and Unidesk Coporation. Charbel has extensive Infrastructure expertise and a vast knowledge of a variety of Microsoft and VMware technologies. He has over fifteen years of professional experience in the Information Technology field and guiding technical teams to optimize the performance of mission-critical enterprise systems. He has worked as a system and network engineer, senior consultant, and as regional technical manager and has a history of successful enterprise projects in the IT, banks, education, and publishing sectors. He works as a Virtualization Consultant and Architect in the MENA region. He authored Getting Started with Windows Nano Server, co-authored Windows Server 2016 Hyper-V Cookbook, Second Edition, and reviewed Hyper-V Best Practices books (Packt Publishing). Charbel also runs his blog at (https://charbelnemnom.com) where he blogs frequently about Software Defined Datacenter and Cloud Computing. Charbel is Microsoft, Cisco, and VMware certified and holds the following credentials: VCA-DCV, MCP, MCSA, MCTS, MCITP, MCS, MCSD, MCSE, CCNP, ITIL®, and PMP®. You can also follow him on Twitter @CharbelNemnom.

Leandro Carvalho works as Microsoft specialist with products such as Windows Server, Hyper-V, Public and Private Cloud, Office 365, Security, System Center, Exchange, Sharepoint, Project Server and client systems, in addition to helping the community constantly with articles, forums, videos and lectures about his passion: Microsoft Virtualisation and Cloud Computing. He has been speaking in large events such as MMS, Teched Australia, MVP Pro Speaker Series and many others and is the author of the Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V Cookbook. Leandro has been working as Microsoft trainer since 2006 and has obtained the certifications Certified Ethical Hacker/MCP/MCSA+M+S/MCSE+S/MCTS/MCITP/MCT and MVP. In 2009 he received the MCT Awards Latin America Trainer of the year and since 2009 the Microsoft MVP as a Virtualisation Specialist.