Lots of People to Thank!

We’re getting to the end of the production phase (reviewing the final PDF versions that go to the printer) of Mastering Hyper-V Deployment, the Hyper-V book that I have written.

There’s a bunch of people to thank:

We’ll start with Sybex … you all know who you are.  From helping me with the original proposal, keeping the project on schedule, to keeping the quality high, and fixing my many grammatical mistakes (should I now reveal that I got a lower D in English in secondary school?), everyone has been of great help.

My co-author was Patrick Lownds, another virtual machine MVP in the UK.  Patrick came in late on the project and bailed me out on a couple of chapters, taking on one particular chapter that I would not have been able to do in time, but that I thought was central to the story: DPM 2010.

The technical editor was Hans Vredevoort, a clustering MVP (and honorary virtual machine MVP) in the Netherlands.  Hans made this a better book, spotting mistakes and providing new ideas.

Mark Minasi was kind enough to contribute a foreword to the book.  Mark gave me my first opportunity with Mastering Windows Server 2008 R2, and he’s taught me a lot over the last 5 years.

Wilbour Craddock in Microsoft Ireland helped me out at a crucial point in the project.  I hit a pretty big snag at one point and things got delayed.  Will helped out, not to mention providing a lot of help to me over the last few years.  He, Dave Northey and Enda Flynn have given me some opportunities over the past 2 years that have made a huge difference, and helped me get to a position where I could write this book.

Then there’s my friends in the MVP program.  I’ve learned a lot from those folks, including the MVPs, leaders, and various people in the product groups, the Virtual Machine and Failover Clustering groups in particular.  A lot of what I learned, be it new ideas, configurations, etc, have shaped my view of Hyper-V and System Center (nothing under NDA, honest!).

Finally, a lot of folks I know online supported and encouraged me over the last 5 months: my friends on the Minasi forum, and words of encouragement from folks by email or on Twitter.

Thank you all!

Aidan.