Emil Grama
Verified Expert in Engineering
VMware ESXi Developer
Bucharest, Romania
Toptal member since April 12, 2016
Emil has been working for 15 years as a senior system administrator, DevOps engineer, and technical team lead for medium/large companies in the US and Europe. He has experience working with Unix (Linux, Solaris, HP-UX) systems in all project phases from solution design to implementation, testing, and operational support. He specializes in automation, virtualization, and data center migration, and has a special interest in system security.
Portfolio
Experience
Availability
Preferred Environment
Vagrant, Puppet, Python, Bash, Shell
The most amazing...
...thing I've designed and implemented was a central authentication solution (Kerberos+OpenLDAP) still in use after 5 years by thousands of systems.
Work Experience
Senior System Administration Consultant
Dell International Services
- Provided operational administration of Unix servers for Dell clients in the US.
- Migrated a data center for Dell US customers.
- Configured and deployed new servers using orchestration and automation tools.
- Wrote procedures for disaster recovery and tested them during BCP exercises.
- Provided mentoring and guidance to less experienced team members.
UNIX Consultant
Belgacom/Proximus - Belgium
- Worked as a backup key UNIX resource during outages; WarRoom presence.
- Served as the escalation point for complex UNIX incidents, providing resolution and RCAs.
- Wrote scripts to fully automate new servers and virtual machine provisioning, configuration, and patching.
- Configured VMs in Veritas Cluster and took part in disaster recovery exercises.
Senior Unix Administrator/Technical Team Leader
Vodafone Romania
- Managed technical projects for areas like system virtualization and consolidation.
- Contributed input for medium and long-term infrastructure strategy planning (evaluating solutions, product, and vendors).
- Proposed solutions for optimizing existing infrastructure usage to achieve better KPIs and meet all SLAs.
- Served as the escalation point for all major incidents in the UNIX domain.
- Supervised the work of a 5 person team, providing input, support, and guidance to less-experienced team members.
- Designed, built, and implemented a fault-tolerant authentication and access solution for all Unix servers (Linux, Solaris, HP_UX); the solution was based on OpenLDAP, Kerberos, and OpenVPN.
UNIX System Administrator
Vodafone Romania
- Maintained existing infrastructure, including Unix servers, FC switches, disk arrays, and tape libraries.
- Troubleshot and solved incidents and provided RCAs.
- Identified tasks suitable for automation and wrote scripts to implement it.
- Implemented new projects in close cooperation with DBAs and other support groups.
- Contributed to solution design, implementation, and testing for BCP and disaster recovery.
Network/UNIX System Administrator
National Center For Information Technology
- Maintained the existing infrastructure and installed, configured, and patched the server and workstations.
- Co-authored and taught an introductory Unix course to students and employees at partner companies.
- Added and removed network routes and provided firewall administration.
Experience
Puppet Configuration File
This file installs and configures a MySQL database server on a CentOS 7 server using an SQL script available online. It also configures an instance on NGINX to load balance requests toward two Docker containers, each running a simple Django web app that connect and query to the MySQL server.
Note: Almost all the code I've written are under NDA and cannot be shared publicly.
Education
Master's Degree in Civil Engineering
Technical University of Civil Engineering - Bucharest
Skills
Libraries/APIs
Puppet.js, OpenLDAP
Tools
Veritas Cluster Server, Corosync, EMC NetWorker, VMware, Vagrant, Ansible, Shell, Puppet, OpenVPN, VirtualBox, Pacemaker, NGINX
Platforms
Solaris, Linux, KVM, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Docker, Amazon EC2, CentOS, Linux CentOS 7
Storage
LVM, Veritas Volume Manager, MySQL
Languages
Bash, Python, SQL
Frameworks
Django
Other
VMware ESXi, ZFS, Oracle Solaris, Cisco, RHEL, Kerberos
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