Kevin Foster

I am a Senior Systems Administrator for Open Text Corporation and have 14 years of system administration experience. I have worked the past 11 years supporting research and development groups. I have managed lab environments with as few as 100 to as many as 1200 systems. While at Vignette Corporation, I grew the lab systems from 400 to 1200 systems while the staff was reduced from ten administrators to two. Now at Open Text I will be working to consolidate several disparate computer labs into four main labs. My ability to automate, track, monitor and manage multiple operating system environments has helped deliver hundreds of product releases on time. Over the last three years, I have been working to reduce the number of physical systems by deploying virtualization technologies and have earned a VMware Certified Professional certification. I started my career as a Microsoft windows administrator and now I am also experienced in supporting VMware, Red Hat, Suse, OS X, Solaris, AIX and HPUX operating systems.

Kevin Foster’s Specialties:

Certifications:
VMware Certified Professional (VCP)

Operating Systems I work with:
VMware ESX
Windows 2000/2003/XP
Red Hat
SuSE
Solaris
AIX
HPUX
Apple OS X

Applications:
Virtual Lab Management with VMLogix
Altiris Deployment Server

Storage:
iSCSI Storage with Equallogic
Common RAID designs

Kevin Foster’s Experience

Senior Systems Administrator

Open Text

(Public Company; OTEX; Computer Software industry)

July 2009 — Present (5 months)
Senior Systems Administrator

Vignette Corp.

(Public Company; 501-1000 employees; vign; Computer Software industry)

September 2000 — Present (9 years 3 months)

I build and maintain the infrastructure for Vignette’s Lab Services. I support Vignette’s engineering, professional services and customer services teams by building test environments and customer configurations for troubleshooting, quality assurance and performance testing needs.
IT Network Integrator

United Services Automobile Association

(Privately Held; 10,001 or more employees; Insurance industry)

June 1999 — September 2000 (1 year 4 months)

Co-administrated the Virtual Lab Services network - an Ethernet / ATM, fully redundant, local and wide area network.
Performed Setup and troubleshooting of network environments to support the Virtual Lab Service’s special projects.
Conducted a bandwidth study using SNMP data collection for web developer work at home project.
Installed and maintained the MRTG software to keep a history of our network bandwidth.
Provided client server and network support for the Performance and Certification Testing Departments.
IT Systems Analyst

United Services Automobile Association

(Privately Held; 10,001 or more employees; Insurance industry)

January 1998 — June 1999 (1 year 6 months)

Managed and maintained a 500-computer lab for the Performance Software Testing Department.
Developed an innovative process for cloning a master image to 500 computers and then making each machine unique using Perl, SID Software, and NT command line language resulting in reduction of project setup time from 2 days to 4 hours and savings of $13,414 per project.
Collaborated with project manager and internal customers to determine testing environment setup.
Personal Computer Technician

USLD Communications

(Public Company; 501-1000 employees; Telecommunications industry)

March 1997 — January 1998 (11 months)

Managed and maintained 100+ users and 20+ shares on a Citrix Winframe server.
Provided technical support for 700+ users across eight states.
Personal Computer Technician

Alamo Iron Works

(Privately Held; 201-500 employees; Utilities industry)

January 1996 — March 1997 (1 year 3 months)

Sole personal computer technician for 50+ computers in eight departments.
Networked four departments using Windows NT 4.0 servers and Ethernet hubs allowing the drafters to reduce their drawing and fabrication process from eight hours to four hours.

Kevin Foster’s Education

Texas State University-San Marcos

Business 1992 — 1995
Red Hat Training

2004

Red Hat Certified Technician (RHCT)
San Antonio College

Associate in Applied Science , Microcomputer programming

Training:
Interconnecting Cisco network Devices – Global Knowledge
Troubleshooting with the Sniffer Pro Network Analyzer – Catapult
Ethernet Network Analysis and Troubleshooting – Catapult
Red Hat Linux Essentials
VMware Certified Professional (VCP)

VMware Certified Professionals (VCP)
The VMware Certified Professional Program offers technology professionals the knowledge, skills, and credentials to deploy and maintain VMware virtualization technology. This program is designed for any technical individual -- partners, end-users, resellers, and consultants.