Brian Atkinson - VCP5-DCV VMware Certified Professional-Data Center Virtualization on vSphere 5.5 Study Guide: VCP-550

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Writing the update for this book has been another great learning experience for me. In many ways it was familiar for me, and in many ways it was still new. I forgot how writing still requires me to strike some sort of balance with work, family, and friends. I also learned that updating a book is not much less work than originally writing the book. Every exercise, image, case study, paragraph, sentence had to be reviewed for accuracy. As with the first edition of this book, I learned a great deal. This time my learning was about the specific changes in VMware vSphere 5.1 and 5.5, and there are a lot of them. I also was reminded how other people played a key role in helping me complete this book.

I would like to thank Jeff Kellum for his patience and willingness to listen to my ideas. This was a difficult project in many ways, and Jeff was a huge help in shaping how the book came together.

I would like to thank Jim Compton for his editing expertise. Jim offered lots of advice and allowed to me to view things through the non-techie lens in many instances.

I would like to thank my technical editor Andr Pett for his detailed and extremely thorough contributions to this book. Andr contributed so many valuable things to this book, and occasionally verified that I was not losing my mind. Andr's technical expertise is amazing, and I simply can't thank him enough!

I would like to thank my production editor, Eric Charbonneau, for his help with the last-minute updatesthere were lots of them! I would also like to thank my copyeditor, Liz Welch, for her help in catching the mistakes that managed to slip past me and all of the other editors.

I must thank my family for their support in this project. I know it isn't easy, or always comprehensible, why I have to spend another weekend in front of a computer. I look forward to having the time to spend with them now.

Brian Atkinson is a Senior Enterprise Engineer with over 15 years of experience in the IT field. Along the way, he has been a computer lab manager, programmer, network engineer, and systems engineer, and he has worked in education, government, healthcare, finance, and manufacturing environments. For the past seven years, he has been focused on virtualization and storage solutions.

Brian holds the VCP3, VCP4-DCV, and VCP5-DCV certifications and has been awarded the VMware vExpert designation from VMware for 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, and 2013. He is a VMware Technology Network (VMTN) Moderator and Guru. He is also one of the VMUG leaders in Richmond, VA. He maintains his personal blog in the VMTN communities at: