Esther Barthel, after finishing her Master of Science in Computer Science, started working as a Web Application Developer. With a very broad interest in IT technologies, she shifted her interests and broadened her technical knowledge with System, Database, and Network Administration consultancy. When she discovered Citrix MetaFrame XP, she found a product that combined server, application, and user technologies and allowed her to specialize in Server Based Computing solutions. Nowadays she works on different virtualization projects as a Citrix Architect and RES Software Specialist implementing and designing new Citrix and RES Software environments.
She likes to share her knowledge with the Citrix community by posting blogs on her own website http://www.virtues.it and by using her Twitter handle @virtues_it.
She was asked by her colleague Sjaak Laan to review his book IT Infrastructure Architecture (ISBN: 9781447881285) and by Packt Publishing to review Citrix XenServer 6.0 Administration Essential Guide (ISBN: 9781849686167)—a new way to share her knowledge with an even bigger community.
Ferdinand Feenstra is a Citrix Architect and senior specialist in Microsoft environments. He has experience in many complex environments with different customers in different functions.
His experience is categorized in building and designing of Citrix environments, implementations, migrations, projects, and advice.
He has a blog, named www.CitrixGuru.net and is located in the Netherlands.
Juan Perez has been in the IT field for 12 years. He has always strived to be a solution-based resource. Where a challenge is sometimes an obstacle for others, he sees it as an opportunity to make things happen, learn, and grow his skill set. His career began in technical support, working with software issues and helping end users get through their challenges via phone support. This is where he thrived and learned a lot about how to take problem situations and break them down to workable and successful experiences. This allowed him to work his way up to secondary level support where only the harder issues were escalated to him and his team. This also started him on training others and learning how to document and validate solutions to problems, a skill that has been used even now. His simplistic approach to problems is what he believes is the key to his success.
His career has not been like most in IT. He has worked for just a few companies, but in that time he has been able to learn a broad range of technologies. He worked for Decore-ative Specialties in the city of Monrovia, a family owned cabinet door manufacturer, which is one of the largest and most prominent companies in that industry. He started out as a PC Technician and worked his way up to Senior Network Administrator. Going from small day-to-day tasks to fully supporting, designing, and maintaining the company infrastructure. He learned from many talented people there who had years of experience—a great resource for a young up and coming IT professional.
He is currently working for Stearns Lending, a fast growing company that has put the challenge on the IT team to help them grow to a world class company. Stearns is fully equipped with Citrix Xenapp, XenDesktop, and XenServer. Since being introduced to Citrix, he has learned the basics, and moved on to completely managing multiple XenServer environments. He also moved virtual servers off from other Hypervisor platform to XenServer. His goal and interest is to be the best Citrix resource possible to Stearns and others. He is working on getting certified for Citrix and who knows, if the doors open, to work for Citrix and be a fully fledged Citrix Pro.
This is the first book that he has worked on. It was a great experience and he hopes to be able to contribute to, if not write a book himself one day.
Todd Pigram is currently a Solutions Architect for a system integrator, designing solutions around Citrix and other technologies based on customer needs. Prior to this, he was an Enterprise Systems Engineer at a large healthcare organization in the Cleveland area. At this organization, he was part of a team of five engineers that designed, implemented, and supported two Citrix farms totaling 400 servers with 16,000 CCUs. He has been working with Citrix products since 1999.