Jon Hall began his career in IT as a technical educator for companies like SMC Networks, Compaq, and Hewlett-Packard, where he focused on networking, storage area networking, server administration, and datacenter virtualization technologies. Eventually, he became involved in technical certification and has continued to focus on certification for the past 15 years. Jon considers certification to be a critical part of the IT industry, and indeed it has become his passion. As a certification manager at VMware, Jon built an industry-leading program from a single certification to more than a dozen certifications across various technologies and levels of expertise. On the way, he helped over 100,000 IT professionals become virtualization evangelists. During that time he also worked as a technical editor on several VMware Press books and spoke at numerous VMware events across the globe. Today, Jon works as the certification manager for Nutanix, where he continues to create new evangelists in the hybrid and multicloud spaces. This is his first book. He can be reached at www.linkedin.com/in/halljon.

Joshua Andrews is a VMware expert, blogger, and certification enthusiast. His first certifications were Certified Novell Engineer and Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer. Over the years he has also received certifications from NetApp, IBM, and Dell. He currently holds numerous VMware certifications, including VCP6-DCV, VCAP6-DCV, VCIX-DCV, and VCIX-NV. He has also received the VMware vExpert designation every year since 2012.

In his IT career Josh has been a programmer, network engineer, system administrator, storage administrator, technical writer, and consultant, and a freelance instructor for VMware. He worked for VMware for several years as a member of the certification team, focusing on developing and administering the VMware Certified Advanced Professional exams. During that time he acted as technical editor for several books from VMware Press.

Josh has been working with VMware products since late 2001 when he put ESX 1.0 into production at Cass Information Systems in St Louis. He blogs at sostechblog.com and can be reached at [email protected].