About the Authors

Anuj Modi (@vConsultant) is a senior consulting engineer in the Advanced Service Group at Cisco Systems and has worked in architecting and implementing Cisco's cloud and data center solutions. He has more than 14 years' experience in the IT industry, including serving various roles as IT manager at IndSwift, senior system admin at Computer Science Corporation, and virtualization consultant at Hewlett Packard.

He holds a bachelor's and master's degree in computer applications and many industry-standard certifications, such as MCSE, VCP, ITIL, and CCA. He has co-authored a book on VMware NSX and Cisco Unified Computing System. His primary focus is orchestrating and automating infrastructures for private, public, and hybrid cloud solutions with Cisco and third-party products. He has extensive experience in data center assessment, and planning, designing, implementing, and optimizing infrastructure, and helping customers build and migrate to next-generation data centers.

• WordPress: https://anujmodi.wordpress.com/
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/anuj-modi-2866481
• Other: https://communities.vmware.com/thread/528879?start=0&tstart=0

Thanks to my family for having the patience with me in spite of all the time it took me away from them and couldn’t spend quality time. I would like to dedicate this book to my family for all the encouragement and support while writing this book.

?Farhan Nadeem has been in the IT field for over 19 years. He has a master's degree in electrical engineering and holds several industry-recognized certifications, including VCAP-DCA, VCP, CCNP DC, CISSP, CCA, and MCIP-EA. Farhan has proven experience in successfully engineering, deploying, administering, and troubleshooting heterogeneous infrastructure solutions. Starting with the MCSE-NT Microsoft certification in 1997, he's always stayed abreast of the latest technologies and server hardware through proactive learning and successful real-world deployments. He has extensive work experience in complex heterogeneous environments comprising various hardware platforms, operating systems, and applications. This exposure has given him broad knowledge in investigating, designing, implementing, and managing infrastructure solutions. He progressively started focusing on virtualization technologies and the Cisco UCS platform and has completed several successful UCS deployments with multiple virtualization platforms. When not working with computers, he enjoys spending time with his family. He has also technically reviewed the second edition of this book.

I would like to thank my family for providing their support during reviewing of this book.

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 is the author of a virtualization blog (http://stretch-cloud.info) and 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.