Kevin Elder lives in Portland, Oregon, and is a Principal Architect and Engineer at Xiologix LLC. With over 15 years of experience in IT, focused on selling, installing, and supporting virtualization and storage technologies, Kevin is responsible for customer success from initial design through implementation. He has been installing, managing, and selling VMware products for over 10 years. Kevin holds a VCP 6 and is a Dell EMC Elect for 2017.
Kevin was a technical reviewer for Learning VMware vSphere, published by Packt Publishing. This is his first publication as an author.
I would like to thank my wife, Ellen, for her support and encouragement throughout this process. I would also like to thank Christopher for his assistance and guidance. Thank you also to our editors at Packt for their guidance and to the technical reviewers for their invaluable assistance.
Christopher Kusek lives in Portland, Oregon where he is Chief Technology Officer and Executive VP of Engineering at Xiologix. With over 20 years of experience in IT as a technology evangelist and industry leader, Christopher plays a key role in Xiologix's growth, leading its storage and engineering practice to evaluate and architect solutions that meet the client's tactical and strategic goals.
He has over 20 years of experience in the industry with virtualization experience running back to the pre-1.0 days of VMware. He has shared his expertise with many far and wide through conferences, presentations, CXIParty, and sponsoring or presenting at community events and outings, whether it is focused on artificial intelligence, cloud, machine learning, networking, security, storage, or virtualization.
He is the coauthor of the following books:
- VMware vSphere 5 Administration Instant Reference by Sybex (localized in English, German, and Russian)
- VMware vSphere Performance: Designing CPU, Memory, Storage and Networking for Performance-Intensive Workloads by Sybex
- vSphere Design Best Practices by Packt Publishing
Christopher has also written an EMC whitepaper: Ten ways to reduce cost while modernizing your IT, and many more. He has been a frequent contributor to VMware communities, vBrownBag, Twitter, and YouTube, and has been an active blogger for over a decade.
Christopher is a proud VMware vExpert and a huge supporter of the program since its inception. He continues to help drive the growth of the virtualization community. He was named EMC Elect in 2013, 2014, 2015, and 2016, and continues with the renamed program of Dell EMC Elect in 2017. Christopher is a Cisco Champion 2016 and 2017, and has been a member of the VMware vExpert Program for nearly 10 years. Christopher is a vExpert specialist in the breakout designations of vExpert VSAN and vExpert NSX, and he's been a frequent contributor to VMware communities such as vBrownBag. Christopher shares his expertise online in the Thwack community as a SolarWinds ambassador, and he's a regular contributor and delegate to the Gestalt IT Tech Field Day series. You'll find Christopher directly through his Twitter handle, @cxi, and on his YouTube channel, CXI.
You can find him dressing up like a cat, cosplaying some obscure anime or game character, tweeting pictures of his cats, or spending time with his family taking #DevOps and #DadOps to the next level!
I'd like to acknowledge some friends, family, and colleagues. This book would not have been possible if not for the meticulous attention and determination of my coauthor Kevin Elder so to him, hats off! I'd like to thank my dear friend Chad Sakac who continues to rock at every single opportunity. A special shout out to both Pat Gelsinger and Michael Dell who I've met on many an occasion and I know quite intimately the struggle you face to help make our future a possibility. Community leaders such as Stephen Foskett, Cody Bunch, Josh De Jong, and Dave Henry are the very execution of rock stardom and a special shout out to fellow vExpert Thom Greene, who coined the term DadOps.
Lastly, I would like to thank my cats, Taylor, Asher, and Snow, and my actual human family, Alexander, Chris, Emily, Erehwon, and Isabelle!
Keep on catting on! Err, something-something virtualization!
Prasenjit Sarkar is a product manager at Oracle for their public cloud, with a focus on cloud strategy, Oracle Ravello, cloud-native applications, and the API platform. His primary focus is driving Oracle's cloud computing business with commercial and public sector customers, helping to shape and deliver a strategy to build broad use of Oracle's Infrastructure as a Service offerings, such as Compute, Storage, and Database as a Service. He is also responsible for developing public/private cloud integration strategies, customers' cloud computing architecture visions, future state architectures, and implementable architecture roadmaps in the context of the public, private, and hybrid cloud computing solutions that Oracle can offer.
He has also authored six industry-leading books on virtualization, SDN, and physical compute, among others.
He has six successful patents and six more patents pending at the US PTO. He has also authored numerous research articles.