Nitish Uniyal

As a senior engineer at Rackspace Private Cloud, I deliver unparalleled support for VMware products to enterprise clients across the globe. Overseeing one of the world's largest hosted VMware vSphere® implementations, I provide technical expertise for over 40,000 VMs and 10,000 ESXi hosts. My primary duties include:

Handled Escalation: Consulting at the highest level of escalation for technical issues involving VMware vSphere (ESXi, vCenter), SRM, NSX, vSAN, and Zerto.

VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF): Successfully managed VCF upgrade projects, migrating from 3.x to 4.x to enhance infrastructure capabilities.

ESXi & VCenter: Managing and maintaining ESXi hosts and VCenter for optimal virtualization management.

Change Execution: Creating and executing changes for server cabinet migration, part replacement, disaster recovery (DR) tests and failover, and cross data center migration of VMs.

Process Documentation: Developing and maintaining a comprehensive wiki for processes, enhancing knowledge sharing and team collaboration.

DNS Server Upgrades: Handling DNS server upgrades from CentOS 7 to Rocky 9, ensuring system stability and performance.

vRLI & vROPS: Managing projects related to vRealize Log Insight (vRLI) and VMware vRealize Operations (vROPS) upgrades for improved monitoring and analytics.

ISO Audit Leadership: Leading ISO audit processes from a technical perspective, ensuring compliance and maintaining high standards.

Customer Communication: Communicating directly with customers and internal stakeholders, including product managers, customer success managers, pre-sales, and other technical teams.

Infrastructure Projects: Participating in high-profile infrastructure projects, taking full responsibility for the VMware stack.

Performance Analysis: Providing custom recommendations through performance analysis and capacity planning.

Change Management: Managing changes in compliance with customers' and internal change control.

Incident Resolution: Resolving incidents with a sense of urgency through thorough research, log analysis, issue reproduction, and detailed root cause investigation.

Maintenance Planning: Preparing, quality-checking, and executing planned maintenance, including migrations, upgrades, and DR tests.

Technical Leadership: Leading the internal VMware tech council, standardizing technical policies and processes in line with industry best practices, writing, reviewing, and updating internal technical documentation.

Automation Roadmap: Coordinating the automation development roadmap and release based on the needs of the team (acting as an unofficial Scrum Master).

Mentorship: Mentoring junior colleagues to help them develop and grow within the team.

Interviewing: Conducted technical interviews to hire talented engineers, ensuring the addition of skilled professionals to the team.

Senior VMware and Azure Administrator - HCL Technologies

I previously worked at HCL Technologies, where I served two major clients: a USA-based banking client and a UK-based enterprise client. In this role, I was responsible for administering and managing production and non-production environments, ensuring seamless operations and optimal performance across multiple platforms.

USA-Based Banking Client:

Environment: Managed approximately 300 Azure servers and VMware 5.5, 6.0, 6.5 infrastructure, including 5000 ESXi hosts and over 10,000 servers running various operating systems such as Windows Server 2003, 2008, 2008R2, 2012, 2012R2, 2016, Unix.

Tools: Utilized tools like SNOW, Nimsoft, SCCM, and Trend AV for effective system management and monitoring.

Server Management: Handled commissioning and decommissioning of physical and virtual servers, including standalone ESXi installations.

vCenter & Host Upgrades: Successfully upgraded vCenter from 6.7 to 7.0, created new vCenter instances, performed host upgrade activities, and upgraded VxRail nodes from 6.7 to 7.0.

Resource Management: Created resource pools in clusters, enabled HA and DRS features, managed vMotion, svMotion, cloning, cold and hot migration, and set affinity and anti-affinity rules.

Backup and Recovery: Managed VM-level backups, restored VM requests, and handled VM port groups on distributed and standard switches.

Change and Incident Management: Coordinated with clients on change approvals, implementations, and closures, ensuring adherence to SLAs and resolving incident tickets based on priority.

UK-Based Client:

Environment: Managed over 500 servers running various operating systems, including Windows Server 2003, 2008, 2008R2, 2012R2, VMware 5.5, and Azure Site Recovery.

Tools: Utilized tools like SNOW, Nimsoft, WSUS, Trend, and AVAMAR Backup for system management.

Tech Stack:

VMware: Extensive experience with VMware 6.5, 6, 7, and 7.0.

Windows Server: Proficient in managing Windows Server 2012R2, 2016, and 2019.

Backup Solutions: Skilled in using Veeam Backup, Dell PowerEdge 440, and Dell VxRail hardware for backup and recovery operations.

Azure Site Recovery: Expertise in leveraging Azure Site Recovery for seamless disaster recovery and business continuity.