Muni Rao

Professional Summary:
Over 11 years of challenging IT experience on new project implementation, migrations & and BAU
support in VMware vSphere 7. x, 6. x, 5. x upgrades, implementation, ESXi, vCenter, vSAN, LCM Life
Cycle Manager, ESXi CLI, Profile updates, P2V/V2V, snapshots, Deployment, Cluster Configuration –
HA, DRS, affinity rules, SRM, vROPS, Prism Central/Element, AOS, CVM. Windows server OS 2003
– 2019, RAID config, Patch Management, Active Directory, DNS, DHCP, PowerShell automation,
GPO, SCOM, Remedy Incident/Change Management, Backup, Hyper-V, SAN replication, DR/BCP
Activities, SIT/UAT testing, HW including Rackmount & blades of HP iLO/OA, Dell iDRAC/Lifecycle
Controller, Cisco UCSM, Nutanix hyperconverged Servers provision & decommission, Storage
administration including storage pools, containers, zoning, host grouping, Documentation AWS
services including Compute (EC2, Lambda), Storage (S3, Glacier), DB (RDS, DynamoDB), Mgmt.
Tools, IAM, CloudFront, and knowledge on Network & Red Hat Linux.

Certifications & Training:

Qualification:
Master of Computer Applications, JNT University, India - 2009
Bachelor of Science, Andhra University, India - 2006

Professional Experience:

Centene Corporation May 2023 – Till Date

Projects & Responsibilities:

 Plan, design new architecture where necessary to enhance existing vSphere VC infrastructure.
 Overall responsible for end-to-end project related tasks mainly in technical area where to find out
legacy systems, analyze the criticality, dependencies, negotiate with stake holders, application &
server owners on the design, schedule, capacity planning of new HW & in Virtual platform.
 Setup new HW in datacenter, configure RAID, Install ESXi & vCenter servers, configure cluster
HA, DRS & deploy VMs with respective guest OS.
 Managing multiple vCenters with over 2000 esxi hosts in various regions hosting thousands of
virtual machines including critical applications, databases, web servers etc.
 Installing, configuring & managing Virtual Center server. Experience on configuring data store to
ESX server using SCSI, iSCSI or LUN.
 Weekly decks presentation to customer on capacity for existing infrastructure including Compute
& storage for both cloud & non-cloud platforms.
 Quarterly security pathing for hosts using LCM & addressing the vulnerabilities identified by
periodic scanning of servers.
 Configuring and managing ESXi Clusters with HA Settings and Customizing HA for Virtual
Machines.
 Work with datacenter field engineers for new server setup & installations & coordinate for
Hardware related issues along with Vendor support.
 Upgrade HP iLO, Dell iDRAC FW & HW components including array, NW, HBA card etc from
respective vendor bundles followed by Server OS version & Firmware.
 Based on business request, convert physical servers to virtual (P2V) & V2V for case-to-case
requirements.
 Perform DR/BCP along with SAN replication, Network, applications, DB, App servers failover etc.
 Support GPO – Group Policies, AD schema, Organization Units (OU) etc
 Planning & managing Active Directory group policy templates & policy administration, operating
system security patch upgrade for secure computing & Network environment.
 Hands on experience in updating / upgrading ESXi servers thru LCM & PuTTy.
 Check the ticket que, analyze the incident & assign to respective teams.
 Plan & participate in BCP/disaster activities as directed by customer & identify the gaps to avoid in
future, if any.
 Configuration and Installation VMware ESX servers 7.x, 6.x and VMware vCenter and deploy
Guest OS including SIT/UAT support for app installation followed by Prod infra deployment &
GoLive.
 Liaise with multiple infra teams including Network, Storage, apps, DB on the migration activities.
 Handover to BAU with proper documentation & knowledge transfer for smooth operations

Singtel Telecommunications, Singapore April 2022 – January

Projects:
 VMware vSphere farm upgrade project including platform & VDI environment.
 Migration of legacy Windows to Windows 2019
 LUNs & Datastores migration from & to different Storage providers like EMC, Pure.

Responsibilities:
 Responsible for analysis, administration of mentioned projects including survey of existing infra &
plan POC for vSphere farm upgrade, Windows guest OS migration & storage migration.
 Expertise in installation, configuration, and administration of Windows and VMWare servers
 Cluster configurations & maintenance for Windows, ESXi, SQL, File servers etc.
 Orchestrate ESXi host patch updates via Life Cycle manager.
 Monitor vSphere farm using vROPs alerts & highlight issues identified to management for pro-
active measurements.
 vCenter cluster configuration for HA, DRS, vMotion, SvMotion, affinity rules to keep mission
critical VMs availability.
 Extract the WWPN & WWN from new hosts & existing hosts for additional/external storage
provisioning.
 Work with SAN team for Zoning w.r.t ESXi host s& storage device controllers.
 Host grouping & storage LUNs provisioning based on cluster or standalone hosts requirements.
 Configure datastores in ESXi hosts & clusters & plan for datastore migrations from EMC to Pure
storage.
 Troubleshoot vSphere related issues including vCenter, ESXi hosts & VMs. Collect detailed issue
info form vROPs & fix the issues or raise a VMware support case accordingly.
 Propose latest technology & automate tasks to reduce infra resources by saving cost, resources,
manpower.
 Analysis and negotiation on user requirements on the server resources for better capacity planning
 Work with PMO team on new hardware procurements. Involve in delivery, set up of HW in DC &
support discussions with vendors
 Documentation on each migrations including server resources, applications, network ports, DB,
backup, storage, monitoring.
 Resolving Incident tickets respect to proper troubleshooting, findings, resolutions respect to issues
raised

Digi Telecommunications, Malaysia March 2021 – November

Projects:
 HW refresh for the entire virtualization farm including VMware vSphere on HP, Dell & Nutanix
HW.
 Cross-virtual platform migration/replication using Zerto tool.
 Data Center migration
 VM migration including VMs with PCI cards configurations.

Responsibilities:
 Create & update guest OS templates to deploy new VMs as per project requirements.
 Patching & profile uploads for ESXi using update manager & CLI per infra demands.
 Creating Cluster, resource pools, Template & Clone
 Cluster configurations & maintenance for Windows, ESXi, SQL, File servers.
 Worked on VDI Infrastructure that used technologies such as VMware Horizon View 6.0 and 7.0.
 POC tests on implementation plans & runbook preparations.
 Monitor & report daily & weekly performance to the service owners for new servers.
 Supported VMware farm hosted on Nutanix hyperconverged platform thru Prism
Element/Central.
 Provision storage containers from Nutanix storage pools & scaling the datastores in vSphere
cluster.
 Provision NW vLANs in Nutanix CVM clusters & assign VMs NW
 Enable Compression, Deduplication, Erasure for the storage containers per business
requirements.
 Based on business requirement & resource demands, scale the ESXi hosts in vSphere cluster from
Nutanix hypervisors.
 Upgrade the Nutanix components via LCM followed by NCC, Prism, hypervisor etc.
 Upgrade HP HW components via iLO/OA & iDRAC/OEM/Lifecycle Controller for Dell HW

DXC Technology, Malaysia August 2018 – February

Projects:
 Build vSphere VMware infrastructure farm for new Projects over HP, Dell & Nutanix HW.
 VMware Site Recovery Manager (SRM) implementation
 Physical servers to Virtual servers (P2V) migrations including file server services.

Responsibilities
 Regular CAT1 tickets to work on Wintel related tasks.
 Work with various teams, servers/services owners & plan the migrations schedules.
 Plan cluster VM migrations to avoid concurrent moves of active & passive nodes.
 Managed and supported VMware Horizon View environment.
 Performed ESXI host patching from VMware update manager.
 Deployed VMware Horizon VDI Instances and creating over 10,000+ desktops by building an
entirely new infrastructure of Horizon View 7.x also integrated with existing Infrastructure.
 Installed and configured VMware Horizon VDI View Connection Servers (Standard & Replica
 Patch management for both windows & ESXi hosts per organization standards.
 Supported VMware farm hosted on Nutanix hyperconverged platform thru Prism
Element/Central.
 Provision ESXi datastores from Storage containers in Nutanix & storage pools.
 Troubleshoot issues over ESXi hosts, VCSA thru PuTTy CLi and also HW console for HP & Dell etc
 vSwitch, port groups, Storage, cluster HA & DRS configurations
 Manage AOS, Acropolis Hypervisor, Prism, Foundation, NGT, NCC etc.
 Perform DR/BCP along with SAN replication, Network, applications, DB, App failover.
 Handover to BAU with proper documentation & knowledge transfer for smooth operations

VISA Worldwide Pvt. Ltd Singapore June 2017 – March

Projects:
 Cross virtual platform migration/replication using Zerto tool.
 Install, configure and manage VMware solutions, including VSAN.

Responsibilities
 Perform POC on the migration plans & seek respective approvals.
 Work with various teams, servers/services owners & plan the migrations schedules.
 Liaise with multiple infra teams including Network, Storage, apps, DB on the migration activities.
 Ensure the resources including vLANs, datastore, CPU, Memory are sufficient in destination farm
prior to raise CRs
 Plan cluster VM migrations to avoid concurrent moves of active & passive nodes

Schroders Investment Management, Singapore January 2015 – June

Projects:
 VMware vSphere 5.x to vSphere 6.0 Upgrade (vCenter, ESXi, Update Manager, VMs)
 HP Blade c7000 Chassis – Migration (HW) of G1 to G9 Blades
 MS SQL Cluster migrations
 Cisco UCS B blades configuration
 Symantec Email Journaling Implementation

Responsibilities:
 Plan, design new architecture where necessary to enhance existing infrastructure.
 Daily health checks, on-call support, Change, Incident, Request – ITIL process in regular
BAU/operations
 Publish applications in Citrix farm.
 Work on Citrix related issues from the end users.
 Orchestrate ESXi host patch updates via update manager.
 Storage migrations in various regions across APAC
 Upgrade & enhancements of both Business applications & Infrastructure software(s)
 Propose migrations to new server resources with application owners.
 Configuration of SQL DB cluster in Physical and virtual machines
 Upgrade UCS HW using UCSM by downloading bundles A & B from cisco, upload & upgrade
Infrastructure Firmware followed by Server Firmware.
 Plan & schedule for migrations with business/end users.
 Upon proper sign offs, decommission of old servers as per standards & and handover for degauss.

HP Singapore Pte Ltd, Singapore July 2014 – December

Projects:
Singapore Government Agencies (SOEasy)

Responsibilities:
 Wintel System Administration in Singapore Government Project including Physical and virtual
Datacenters environment.
 Configure and implement new and existing operating systems and applications software.
 Supporting AD users - Add, delete, modify user accounts information, resetting password etc
 Work with HP, MS, Dell vendors for HW related issues on demand and for abnormal server
behavior.
 Involvement in planning and responsible for installation & configuring Server builds on servers as
per organization standards.
 Manage VMs on Microsoft Hyper-V virtualization.
 Backup standards including Incremental & full backup based on systems critical.
 Server health monitor using SCOM, maintenance mode during troubleshooting activities.
 Scheduling Power maintenance and activating respective system & Application owners
accordingly.
 Configuring additional tools in the servers as per Project application requirements

CIMB Bank Berhad, Malaysia January 2012 – February

Project:
Core Banking Applications Infra Implementation

Responsibilities:
 Wintel (VMware) System Administration/Specialist in a Core Banking Project including
Physical and virtual Datacenters environments.
 Liaising with multiple teams for PRD-DR data replication activities
 Work with HP, MS, and Dell vendors for critical-based issues on demand and for abnormal server
behavior
 Configuration and Installation VMware ESX servers 5.x, 4.x and VMware vCenter and deploy
Guest OS.
 Installing, configuring & and managing Virtual Center server. Experience on configuring data
store to ESX server using SCSI, iSCSI or LUN.
 Configuring and managing ESXi Clusters with HA Settings and Customizing HA for Virtual
Machines.
 Configure Alerts and migration of the Physical Server to Virtual Server using VMware Converter
(P2V Conversion) and also virtual server to virtual server (V2V conversion).