Christopher Kersten Email & Phone Number

Billings, MT, US

Spring, TX, US

Houston, Texas, United States

Houston, Texas, United States

• Responsibilities same as below, plus the following:
• Trained new staff in junior system administrator roles, including technical training in VMware and Cohesity product solutions.
• Delegated project and operational tasks as an intermediary between management and day-to-day operational staff.
• Performed the duties of a junior systems architect in conjunction with management and senior architectural staff.
• Worked as part of a team on a large-scale NSX Data Center stretched datacenter implementation, including micro-segmentation implementation and integration with virtual F5 load balancer systems.

The Woodlands, TX

• Performed Proof-of-Concept and later implementation of Dell/EMC VxRail hyperconverged solution as part of a hardware refresh and upgrade of the production VDI (VMware Horizon View) environment.
• Performed Proof-of-Concept and later implementation of Nutanix hyperconverged solution for remote campus datacenter locations within the College System.
• Architected and installed Veeam Availability Suite backup solution, in order to reduce costs and consolidate existing backups (in a 98% virtualized environment) from vSphere Data Protection and EMC Avamar.
• Support and maintain datacenter compute hardware at 16 campus and center locations, including HP blades, Cisco UCS hardware, and assorted HP rack-mount servers, including installation, maintenance, firmware management.
• Responsible for installation, patching, and upgrading an environment of 100+ VMware ESXi 5.5 and 6.0 hosts, using established build procedures and security baselines.
• Manage and maintain the VMware Horizon View 7.3 infrastructure, consisting of 20 hosts across 2 separate sites, serving approximately 900 concurrent sessions.

The Woodlands, TX

• Responsible for physical and virtual infrastructure server builds, performance analysis, and troubleshooting of Windows Server 2003, Windows Server 2008, and Windows Server 2012 systems within a 95% virtualized.
• Responsible for operation, and maintenance of Cisco UCS blade infrastructure, including firmware management, VMware ESXi 5.x host patching and upgrades, and all VirtualCenter administration.
• Assist in platform migration from HP blade infrastructure to Cisco UCS enterprise hardware infrastructure.
• Create custom dashboards through VMware vCenter Operations Manager for system monitoring and reporting.
• Part of team responsible for semi-annual datacenter migration (using Zerto) for all virtual servers, as part of regular operations.
• Build and maintain Windows Server templates.

The Woodlands, TX

• Primary job role - VMware View administrator
• Redesigned and rebuilt 2 production VMware View environments, upgrading from View 4.0.0 to View 4.6 in the process.
• Upgraded 2-tier test lab VMware View environment from View 4.0.1 to View 4.5.
• Created and maintained numerous virtual desktop pools for several internal Bank departments, for both production and business continuity purposes, as well as various software testing scenarios.
• Second-level internal software technical support for all bank systems running Windows XP and Windows 7.

The Woodlands, TX

• Shift lead, first point of contact for technical issues for 5 overnight employees.
• Responsible for training new employees.
• Provided second-tier support for all server-, system- and network-related issues, including Windows 2000, Windows 2003, Windows 2008, and AIX servers.
• Performed Junior System Administration duties.
• Deployed new code builds from internal Development team to Production environment.
• Monitored critical systems and network circuits using Microsoft System Center Operations Manager, HP Insight Manger and SolarWinds. Escalated outages and abnormalities to senior management.

Georgetown, TX

• Provided technical support for approximately 500 academic users of both Windows and Macintosh computers, via telephone and on-site visits.
• Set up and maintained three general-purpose computer labs, one departmental computer lab for students studying Chemistry, and one Linux lab for students studying Mathematics and Computer Science.
• Created, deployed, and maintained all computer images for Windows XP computers. Transitioned the university from a hardware-specific imaging regime (a disk image for each model of computer owned) to a platform-based.
• Instituted use of Symantec Ghost Solution Suite for desktop imaging. Created Ghost software packages for deployment of individual software titles.
• Authored technical documentation outlining infrequently-encountered procedures and support issues.
• Created basic scripts for automating large tasks (software inventory, network information gathering from client PCs) using Windows Scripting Host (WSH) and VBScript.

Austin, TX

• Authored technical documentation for roll-out of Windows XP workstations to over 140 Guaranty Bank locations in Texas and California. Assisted in the roll-out in 3 Austin-area branch locations in order to validate this.
• Created ongoing technical support documentation for all levels of Desktop Support.
• Assembled lab environment to test all software applications and new hardware for conversion from Windows 95 to XP.
• Provided second-level remote desktop hardware and software support to Guaranty Financial Services employees.

The Woodlands, TX

• Primary hardware support technician for all computers systems.
• Performed second-level telephone and on-site technical support.
• Coordinated equipment for the opening of more than 20 branch locations throughout Texas.
• Helped to design new inventory procedures for all incoming equipment into the Technology Department.
• Configured all computers for a bank-wide roll-out of Windows XP and new teller system to over 140 branch locations.
• Created and deployed desktop images and software packages using Altiris.