About the Authors
Nick Marshall is a consultant with over 13 years IT experience and holds multiple advanced IT certifications, including VMware Certified Advanced Professional 5—Datacenter Administrator (VCAP5-DCA), and VMware Certified Advanced Professional 5—Datacenter Design (VCAP5-DCD). Currently working for VMware, he delivers virtualization and cloud solutions to some of the biggest organizations in the Asia-pacific region.
Previously, Nick has worked in a number of roles ranging from computer assembler to infrastructure architect and has gained experience across the board. Nick is particularly proud of his ability to solve business problems with technical solutions.
Outside of his day job, Nick continues to work on his passion for virtualization by helping run the most popular virtualization podcast, vBrownBag, and writing on his personal blog, at www.nickmarshall.com.au. You can also find him speaking at industry conferences such as VMUG and PEX. To recognize his contributions to the VMware community, Nick has been awarded the vExpert award for both 2012 and 2013.
Nick lives with his wife, Natalie and son, Ethan in Sydney, Australia.
Scott Lowe is an author, consultant, speaker, and blogger focusing on virtualization, networking, storage, and other enterprise technologies. Scott is currently a technical architect at VMware, focused on software-defined networking (SDN) and network virtualization.
Scott's technical expertise extends into several areas. He holds industry certifications from Cisco, EMC, Microsoft, NetApp, VMware, and others. He also holds the premier VMware Certified Design Expert (VCDX) certification; Scott is VCDX #39. For Scott's leadership in, support of, and involvement with the VMware community, he has been awarded the vExpert designation for all five years since the program's inception (2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, and 2013).
As an author, Scott has contributed to numerous online magazines focused around VMware and related virtualization technologies. He is regularly quoted as a virtualization expert in virtualization news stories. He has five other published books: Mastering VMware vSphere 4; VMware vSphere 4 Administration Instant Reference (with Jase McCarty and Matthew Johnson); VMware vSphere Design (with Forbes Guthrie and Maish Saidel-Keesing); and Mastering VMware vSphere 5 and VMware vSphere Design, 2nd Edition (both with Forbes Guthrie), all published by Sybex.
As a speaker, Scott has spoken at several virtualization conferences as well as at VMworld every year since 2009. He regularly speaks at VMware user group meetings, locally in the United States as well as worldwide.
Scott is perhaps best known for his acclaimed virtualization blog at http://blog.scottlowe.org, where he regularly posts technical articles on a wide variety of topics. VMware, Microsoft, and other virtualization industry leaders regularly refer to content on his site, and it is regularly voted among the top five virtualization weblogs worldwide. Scott's weblog is one of the oldest virtualization-centric weblogs that is still active; he's been blogging since early 2005.
Scott lives near Denver, Colorado, with his wife, Crystal; his two youngest sons, Sean and Cameron; and—during the school year—his Chinese exchange student, Tim.