About the Authors
Andrea Mauro has 20 years of experience in IT, both in the industry and the academic world. He currently works as a solution architect in an Italian IT company (founded in 2000). He is responsible for infrastructure implementation, architecture design, upgrades, and migration processes.
He is a virtualization and storage architect, specializing in VMware, but also Microsoft, Citrix, and Linux solutions. His first virtualized solution in production was built around ESX 2.x several years ago.
He is a VMware Italian User Group founder and board member, VMTN community moderator, vBrownbag and Backup Academy contributor, and a passionate blogger.
His professional certifications include not only several VMware certifications (VCP3/4/5/6-DCV, vSAN 2017 Specialist, different VCAP, VCIX6-DCV, VCIX-NV, VCDX3/4/5/6-DCV), but also other vendor-related certifications (MCITP, MCSA, MCSE, NPP, CCA, EMCIE, EMCSA, VMCE, VMCA). He is also a VMware vExpert (2010-17), Nutanix NTC (2014-17), and Veeam Vanguard (2015-17), and he was a Microsoft MVP (2014-16).
I would like to thank my wife and my son for their patience (this book has taken a lot of my free time for three long months), my friends from the VMUG.IT for their support, the co-authors Paolo and Karel for their support, without which this book would not have been possible (at least not with the proposed deadline), and Scott S. Lowe for his words and suggestions.
Paolo Valsecchi has worked in the IT industry for more than 20 years, and he currently works as a system engineer mainly focused on VMware vSphere, Microsoft technologies, and backup/DR solutions. His current role involves covering all of the tasks related to ensuring the IT infrastructure availability and data integrity (implementation, upgrade, and administration).
He holds the VMware VCP5-DCV, Veeam VMCE professional certifications, and he has been awarded the VMware vExpert title (2015-17) and the Veeam Vanguard title (2016-17).
A big thanks to Andrea and Karel for including me in this project, my family for their support and patience during this hard work, and all the people who supported me during this adventure.
Karel Novak has 16 years of experience in the IT world. He currently works as a senior virtual infrastructure engineer at Arrow ECS, the Czech Republic, responsible for implementation, design, and complete consultation of VMware and Veeam. As an instructor of advanced VMware and Veeam, he has delivered many courses.
He specializes in VMware DCV and NSX and of course Veeam. He has been using VMware for 10 years and Veeam from the first version. He is the VMware User Group Leader for the Czech Republic, and Veeam User Group Czech Republic founder and unofficial Leader.
He is a VMware vExpert 2012-2017, VMware vExpert NSX 2016-2017, and a Veeam Vanguard 2015-2017.
His highest certifications are VCI-Level2, VCIX6-NV, VCIX6-DCV, VMCT-Mentor, and VMCA. He is also a VMware Certification Subject Matter Expert.
I must say thank you to Andrea and Paolo for this opportunity. Thank you to my amazing wife who supports me in all my projects. Thank you to all those around me who support me in all the activities that I do.