Experience
Linux Systems Administrator
I started my professional Journey in 2009. After being enrolled in a Science program at ISU in 2005 and owning/operating a shaved ice stand for nearly 7 years, I was able to get a job working for Steadfast networks in Chicago, IL. I hadn't yet finished my degree and was chomping at the bit for this job, as well as being distracted by the dollar signs that came with it. After 6 months I was feeling overwhelmed. I was thrown into the fires of the fast-paced world of web hosting, assisting the demands of customers from networking to database administration inside of all flavors of Linux, and Windows OS's. A bit too much for me at the time, as well as expensive. It turns out that $40,000 even in 2009 wasn't quite enough to make the best living in Chicago without having several roommates, even so, saving money was a hard thing to do. So I decided to return home to southwestern Indiana and try again.
Student Professional
I briefly worked at a hospital upon returning and quickly realized that I didn't like it. The mentality of the IT department was old school, and they had trouble adopting newer practices. I decided to finish my bachelor's and look for employment elsewhere. Luckily the University that I was attending was hiring for junior-level employment, and I already had a rapport with them as a skilled student worker for the infrastructure team a couple of years prior. I was hired into an infrastructure generalist position and was able to use all of the skills I had acquired in the real world, only this time at a more comfortable, and affordable pace. I managed several projects for them, including creating a homegrown honey pot to thwart bots hammering RDP and SSH ports, as well as implementing some Linux patch management (Spacewalk with CENTOS and RedHat Satellite) and lower-level VDI deployments. Soon after graduating, I started to itch for advancement that wasn't available at the university at the time. I started casually browsing, and interviewing but couldn't grasp anything exciting. One day, a former assistant director of my department at the university got a hold of me and asked me to come and meet with the leaders of a local ISP & Consulting firm. We hit it off and a new chapter began.
Consulting
After meeting with the head of Joink Technology Solutions Group, I was offered the position of special projects associate. I was also toying with the idea of graduate school, and they were willing to let me be flexible to attend classes during the day if I needed to. Grad school didn't pan out, for reasons that are beyond the scope of my work history, but let's say I was learning more in the real world, and the professors in my programs weren't really up to speed with the modern demands of technology. They were teaching MS Access in 500-level courses in 2012.. yes you read that correctly. I was given exposure and autonomy to create entire ecosystems from the ground up with Joink. This was an experience I was truly grateful for, the hours were long and tough, but the pay and experience were top-notch. My greatest project was creating a VDI experience through VMware view, for an entire school system. This included everything from bare metal ESXi and vCenter installs and clustering to selecting products to deliver applications. It also included things that I hadn't had much exposure to and wasn't as comfortable in. This entailed working with the school system to obtain complete employee data from an IBM A/S400 to build an AD forest from the ground up including populating the employee data so that they would have logins for the VDI platform. As well as working with 3rd part hardware vendors of physical lock access databases to be synchronized with AD so that the same ID card to unlock doors, would be available for print release jobs out of the VDI environment. The whole thing was contained in a fresh built data center, on Cisco UCS C-series servers, loaded with disks, configured in vSAN for fast application performance and delivery. The platform unidesk was selected for application delivery (since purchased by Citrix, and was the only good solution for this at the time.) Application packages were built and deployed to a selected elementary school pilot, and NVIDIA grid cards were used in the vGPU beta program (at the time) coupled with teradici PCoIP CPU offload cards, to ensure that each of the teachers VM's would perform google earth with full graphics detail and minimal lag. Networking between schools was sufficient with a new 1 Gb fiber link provided by Windstream, with cisco gear at the helm of each location. DHCP was put in place for the new thin clients at switches at each school, and DHCP for the VM images was handled with the Active Directory services, as well as profiles and logins scripts set to DFS shares to be loaded on login so that they could change their desktop images for a more personal experience. Overall the project was a success, and I also was exposed to my first DR scenarios for other customers that included fiber networks, with FCoE and last-mile vendors to supply complete DR backup sync, across metropolitan areas of about 70 miles. Over time the stress and long hours got to me. I decided to look for something slower, and as luck would have it, there were higher-level positions back at the university. After 2.5 years of long weeks, long nights, and not much free time I decided to make a move back to the university.
Virtual Infrastructure Architect
Back home at the university. I was greeted with open arms, slightly higher pay, and more responsibility. While not as exciting as my previous work, it was something to be proud of. I managed the entirety of the virtual infrastructure and Storage Array Network. I made some nice achievements:- Consolidating ESXi Hosts, reducing VM hardware footprint by 36%.
- Reducing VMware support licenses, and cost by 53%.
- Transitioning of campus data from HPE EVA storage arrays to EMC Unity series arrays, leading to a 100% reduction in application administrators, and end users I/O latency complaints,
- Clean issue-free upgrade from vSphere 5.5 to 6.5.
- Clean issue-free upgrade from vSphere 5.5 to 6.5.