Ben Neise is a university graduate with MCP, VCP & CCA qualifications. He has worked in desktop support, application packaging and most recently managing and supporting a large VMware infrastructure.

In his spare time, Ben enjoys reading, photography and spending time with his family.

Personal Details

Name

Ben Neise

Date of Birth

16th November 1980

Address

10 Denny Road
Dennyloanhead
Falkirk
FK4 1RP

Telephone

Available on request

E-mail

ben@neise.co.uk

LinkedIn

http://www.linkedin.com/in/benneise

Experience

Technical

• Configuration and use of VMware products including VI3, vSphere 4, Server, Lab Manager, Workstation & Converter.
• Configuring, supporting and administering Windows servers (from NT to 2008 R2) running Active Directory using complex Group Policy Objects.
• Configuring, supporting and administering Citrix Presentation Server (XenApp)
• Configuring and administering Citrix XenDesktop
• Configuring, supporting, administering and packaging applications for, Microsoft Application Virtualization (SoftGrid).
• Administering and supporting Microsoft Office SharePoint 2007
• Extensive deep knowledge of the Windows operating system, registry & services.
• Installing, configuring, and administering MS SQL, (including writing SQL queries), IIS & SCCM.
• Scripting using Windows Shell scripting (batch files), VBScript, PowerShell and Python.

Business

• Familiarity with ITIL and CapM best practices.
• Statistical data analysis techniques
• Excellent communication & documentation skills
• Able to train and develop skills in others

Personal Attributes

• Experienced at dealing with a broad spectrum of customers
• Team player
• Professional approach
• Committed to customer satisfaction
• Good problem solving skills
• Interested in many aspects of IT/IS outside of work

Training & Qualifications

Professional

May 2003
70-290 MCP Qualification in Administering and Maintaining a Windows Server 2003 Environment

August 2006
70-270 MCP Qualification in Installing, Configuring and Administering Windows XP Professional

March 2008
Windows Vista: Deployment and Optimisation for Technical Professionals

November 2008
VMware Certified Professional on Virtual Infrastructure 3 (Plus VMware Sales Professional and VMware Technical Sales Professional pre-requisites)

December 2008
Citrix Certified Administrator on XenServer Enterprise Edition 4.0

July 2009
70-291 MCP Qualification in Implementing, Managing and Maintaining a Windows Server 2003 Network Infrastructure

December 2009
VMware Certified Professional on vSphere 4

Personal

July 2002
BSc (Hons) Psychology (2:1) University of Stirling

Positions Held

June 2007 – Present
Dell Solutions UK
Infrastructure Support Team Leader
Glasgow Application Management Centre

Jan 2006 – June 2007
Dell Solutions UK  (formerly ACS (UK) Limited)
Application Packaging Technician
Prudential UK Limited

Sep 2003 – Jan 2006
ACS (UK) Limited
Technical Support Consultant
Devro (Scotland) Limited

Sep 2002 – Aug 2003
Prudential / Hays Personnel
Temporary New Business Administrator

Major Assignments

Dell Application Management Center

• Responsibility for a large VMware Virtual Infrastructure environment running over 900 highly heterogeneous guests in over 40 individual AD domains. Managed infrastructure team to ensure that all calls are handled within OLAs, and ensuring that root-cause analysis is performed to reduce re-occurrence.
• Required to rapidly create test environments to wide-ranging customer specifications, then administer and support these environments.
• Introduced detailed monitoring of VMware ESX, allowing statistical trend analysis for capacity management. Benefits included increased productive virtual machine density by 30% through a programme of rightsizing machine allocations
• Implemented knowledge sharing practices among the Infrastructure Support team, as well as a large number of other process improvements. These improvements reduced the average time taken to onboard a new customer’s infrastructure from 5 to 2 days.
• Project managed a VMware Lab Manager feasibility study.
• Managed a large datacenter migration project, including upgrading from VI3 to vSphere 4.
• Implemented advanced storage functionality (Linked Clones) allowing machine densities to be further increased.

Prudential

• Packaging applications for deployment via the Prudential’s proprietary systems.
• Testing across multiple staged-environments to ensure a high standard of work.
• Experience gained with shell scripting, registry editing application testing and deployment and a wide range of troubleshooting, analysis and system management tools.
• Unique process where packager owned the application from acquisition to deployment, and was responsible for all stages of testing. Work was done to tight deadlines as part of a multi-stakeholder process.

Devro

• Assisted with the creation of a Microsoft Active Directory infrastructure, and the subsequent migration of over 200 workstations and users from a mixed Windows NT/95 environment to the new infrastructure.
• Diagnosed and fixed a wide range of hardware, software & networking problems, both at a first line and second line level.  Installed and configured Lotus Notes 6 & 7, and assisted with the migration between versions.
• Deployed 150 Wyse WinTerm thin clients with a Citrix MetaFrame backend.  Included major hardware consolidation; replacing multiple PCs, printers and hardware devices with thin clients and shared workstations, and replacing multiple single-role legacy servers with a VMware ESX Server based virtualisation solution.
• Self managed, prioritising user issues and collating information on problems ideally solving the root cause of the issue, with a view to reducing user dependency on Helpdesk.

Referees

Available on request.