A University client of ours are looking for a Senior Systems Engineer to work on a combination of both project based and BAU work primarily around VMWare.

This position is being offered on an initial 3 month contract, with the view to extend to 6, and will be offered outside of IR35. Please note, that due to University policy, a minimum of 2 days per week will be required onsite in the Oxfordshire area for this position.

Current applications are in a combination of VSphere, VMWare, Linux, Windows, and Ansible. Experience of VMWare, Linux, and Ansible are essential for this role.

In addition to clearing a significant backlog, the University are also looking to upgrade from VSphere 7 to 8.

Role specific information:

"As a University we currently are strategically trying to go 'cloud first' and already have various applications running in multiple clouds. We are adopting SaaS first but also a large mix of PaaS, IaaS and Hosted applications that need integrating with various existing systems. However, on top of that major initiative we still have ~500 VMs (50% Unix, 50 % Windows) on a VMware (vSphere 7.0/NSX-T) Flexpod solution hosted over two data centres which is approaching end of life. Applications are fronted by F5 BIG-IP ADCs for reverse-proxy, SSL offload, headers manipulation and load balancing (and currently our SSL VPN). Backup and DR is being currently handled by Veeam (to 'On Prem' cross-site backup arrays/tape libraries) and VMware Site Recovery Manager.

We are currently on an 'exciting' project to move to a position where we hope to see 80% of VMs hosted in VMware Cloud on AWS SDDCs and going down to one 'On Prem 'site on with new Dell VxRail hosts for the 20% we estimate will need to remain onsite. The idea is the number of SaaS or native AWS (and/or multi-cloud) applications will grow somewhat organically and the VMC/vXRail platforms will reduce over time.We mostly deploy VMs using Ansible / Git but are looking to adopt as much Infrastructure as Code as possible as we are a small team and rely on automation. We are interested in adopting other skills Eg Terraform etc along those lines. We focus on keeping as secure as possible and so isolate our applications/VMs as much as possible with a zero-trust approach with micro segmentation and are also assisting the network team with adoption of new NG [Fortigate] Firewalls, a new Aruba Core and Splunk supported by a third party. We adhere to ITIL and have ServiceNow as our ITSM platform and have an Operations team that deals with day-to-day but they escalate to us as a third/fourth line. However, maintaining the estate also means there is a good mix of 'business as usual' alongside project work."


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