Nihar Akula

Houston,TX

Summary

Over 7+ years Experience with Linux system management, including installation, configuration, and maintenance of servers. Utilizes scripting languages to automate repetitive tasks and enhance system efficiency. Knowledge of network protocols and security measures to safeguard critical data and maintain system integrity.

Overview

years of professional experience

Work History

LINUX SYSTEM ADMINISTRATOR

Neo IT Staffing

Houston, TX

02.2021 - Current

Led end-to-end migration of Veritas Cluster Server (VCS/Infoscale) environments, ensuring high availability of business-critical applications with zero data loss.
Performed cluster assessment, compatibility checks, and dependency mapping to prepare large-scale migrations involving 100+ servers.
Designed and executed node-by-node migration strategies, minimizing downtime through controlled failover and rollback mechanisms.
Managed storage migrations (SAN, LUNs, volume groups, Veritas Volume Manager) and validated cluster-aware file systems.
Implemented and tested I/O fencing, quorum disk, and heartbeat networks to prevent split-brain and ensure cluster stability.
Conducted post-migration validation and failover testing, ensuring seamless service group recovery and application availability.
Automated cluster configuration validation using haef-verify and custom scripts, improving migration efficiency.
Collaborated with DBA, storage, and application teams to migrate mission-critical workloads (Oracle DB, IBM MQ, WebLogic, etc.) on clustered servers.
Documented migration runbooks, HA failover procedures, and disaster recovery plans for operational readiness.
Provided 24/7 production support for clustered environments, troubleshooting failover incidents and optimizing cluster performance.
Upgraded Redhat servers from RHEL 7 to RHEL 8 using leapp.
Successfully performed in-place operating system upgrades using Leapp utility from RHEL 7 to RHEL 8, ensuring minimal downtime and full system recovery.
Executed pre-upgrade assessments using Leapp preupgrade tool, identified and resolved blocking issues before upgrade execution.
Coordinated and automated upgrade procedures for multiple systems, leveraging Ansible playbooks and Leapp automation scripts to streamline the process.
Validated upgrade readiness by analyzing Leapp answerfile, package repositories, kernel dependencies, and third-party software compatibility.
Performed post-upgrade validation, including kernel version checks, service functionality testing, SELinux status, and log audit.
Upgraded production servers from RHEL 8 to RHEL 9, ensuring compliance with security baselines and compatibility with enterprise applications.
Experienced with working on monitoring tools like OEM and Zabbix.
Automating server build using ansible playbook.
Worked on VMware ESX Servers and provided NFS volumes and LUNs to ESX Servers.
Applying OS patches and security fixes on Solaris and Linux servers.
Configuring Linux package management using satellite and spacewalk.
Upgrading OS management tools versions for satellite and spacewalk.
Installed and configured Red Hat Network Satellite for managing provisioning and monitoring RHEL 7/8servers.
Effective maintenance of resources using ansible and VMware and monitoring the health every day.
Used Ansible Tower, which provides an easy-to-use dashboard and role-based access control, so that it's easier to allow individual teams access to use Ansible for their deployments. Written the Ansible YAML scripts to configure the remote servers.
Coordinated with Application developer teams to assist in troubleshooting.
Experience with change control management using BMC Remedy tool in handling Work Orders on production systems in a large datacenter environment.
Used Splunk for Application Log, Security Log and Performance monitoring.
Migrating OS management application from oracle Linux to red hat Linux.
Automating repetitive tasks using automation tools like ansible.
Maintaining users and filesystems in Unix and Linux servers.
Worked on storage and OS migration projects.
Installed and configured high availability cluster for sap Hana environment.
Changing OS password quarterly and generating SOX audit report on sox compliant servers.
Backup Solaris and Linux servers for bare metal and file recovery using Veeam, Bacula enterprise backup tool and ZFS snapshots.
Part of the team deploying micro services using Docker containers.
Installed and configured to use Red Hat Pacemaker for high availability.
Manage the highly available network file system storage on Linux cluster.
Administered Linux servers, ensuring optimal performance and security across multiple environments.
Automated system monitoring processes, enhancing response times to incidents and reducing downtime.

Unix/Linux Systems Engineer

RK Infotech

07.2019 - 01.2021

Responsible for providing 24x7 production support for Linux/Solaris production systems using BMC remedy tool.
Involved in managing incidents and change requests to manage server infrastructure by providing break/fix and taking care of all maintenance activities like OS patching, hardware replacements and upgrades.
Day to day production support including checking daily logs, backup/recovery procedures, disaster recovery periodic maintenance and off-hours problem support.
Performed multiple in-place upgrades from RHEL 7 to RHEL 8 using Leapp utility, minimizing downtime and preserving system configurations and application states.
Performed multiple in-place upgrades from RHEL 7 to RHEL 8 using Leapp utility, minimizing downtime and preserving system configurations and application states.
Leveraged Red Hat Insights and leapp-report.txt analysis for identifying critical upgrade risks and compliance gaps, and remediated them proactively.
Implemented custom hooks in Leapp framework to handle environment-specific conditions like third-party drivers, kernel tuning parameters, and file system migrations.
Automated Kickstart images installation, build, patching and configuration of 500+ Enterprise Linux servers on Dell PowerEdge and Sun hardware.
Performed OS upgrades, migrations on Redhat , SuSE and Solaris 10/11.
Primary member of the team to successfully implement SPARC migration from Sun hardware to LDOMs running on Solaris 10 and Solaris 11.
Responsible for patching large number of Linux/Solaris servers using Satellite and spacewalk.
Extensively worked on file systems like EXT2, EXT3, UFS, VxFS, VxDMP, VCFS, OCFS, OCFS2, ASM, and other journaling filesystems.
Experience with automating installations, post configurations, developing tools and day-to-day activities using shell scripts like bash and perl.
Installed and configured Solaris 10 zones.
Installed and configured Red Hat Network Satellite for managing provisioning and monitoring RHEL 7/8servers.
Involved in decommissioning of both physical and virtual servers.
Work with external teams to perform penetration tests on network devices, operating systems, databases, and applications.
Configured LVM, NIS, NFS, Web Server, Samba server, DHCP server, NAT, Primary Secondary and cache-only DNS server. Administered mail servers.
Knowledge of security threats and vulnerabilities and how to detect and mitigate them.
Experiencing with configuring bacula and Veeam on Linux and Solaris and Suse Linux servers.
Responsible for deploying Oracle database environments on large number of oracle enterprise Linux systems.
Coordinated with Oracle DBAs on wide range of projects to troubleshoot, performance tuning and optimizing database applications.
Responsible for setting up ASM disk groups and configure raw devices for database configuration.
Environment: RHEL 5, 6, and 7,8 Solaris 8 and 10 are vSphere, Centrify VMWare, Red Hat, Ansible, Ruby, Bash, Dell PowerEdge R710, R720, R820, HP Proliant, Oracle T5220, 5420, T4-1, T5-1, V880, VVM, VCS, VNB, EMC Symmetrix.

Education

Ms -

Stevens Heneger college

salt lake city, utah

02.2018

Bachelor of Science and Technology - undefined

JNTU Hyderabad

01.2015

Skills

Experience with various operating systems: Linux (versions 5-8), Solaris (10/11), AIX, CentOS, Ubuntu, SUSE, Windows, and Mac OS
Expertise in system diagnostics with tools like top, ps, netstat, and journalctl
Network: NFS, NIS, DNS, FTP, SFTP, TCP/IP, nexus 9000, nexus 5000, F5 and ngnix
Cloud Platforms: Amazon Web Services (AWS), Oracle Cloud at Customer, Azure
Management Tools: Red Hat Satellite, SuSE Manager, Oracle Spacewalk
Cloud: Azure, AWS, Oracle Cloud, Oracle Cloud at Customer (ExaCC), open shift
CI/CD & Version Control: Git, GitLab CI, Jenkins (basic), Bitbucket
Configure management tools: Ansible Tower, Docker, Kubernetes

Cluster Environment: VERITAS Cluster Servers, Oracle RAC, Redhat Cluster
Server Build & Configuration: Kickstart, PXE Boot, Ansible, VMware vSphere, systemd, LVM
Server Migration: rsync, SCP, cron jobs, Ansible Playbooks, tar, NFS
Security & Hardening: SELinux, firewalld, iptables, auditd, logrotate, Fail2ban, OS patch management, CIS benchmarks
Scripting & Automation: Bash (advanced), Python (intermediate), YAML, Shell Scripts, systemd service scripts
Documentation & Collaboration: Confluence, Markdown, SharePoint, Runbook creation, network diagrams using drawio
Cloud & Virtualization: AWS EC2, S3, IAM; Azure VM, Blob Storage; VMware ESXi, KVM, VirtualBox

Timeline