Senior Systems Administrator at Donegal Insurance Group in Marietta, PA

Company Overview

Donegal Insurance Group is a regional property-casualty insurance company doing business in 26 states, headquartered in Marietta, PA, with 7 regional offices located in Athens, GA, Le Mars, IA, Grand Rapids, MI, Albuquerque, NM, Greenville, OH, Glen Allen, VA, and Sheboygan Falls, WI.

Donegal offers a broad range of personal and commercial insurance products sold exclusively through our network of independent agents. We are committed to the independent agency system and proud of the company's heritage, which spans over 130 years. Donegal's strong financial foundation and successful operating strategies have earned the company a rating of 'A' (Excellent) by the A.M. Best Company, the nation's leading insurance rating organization.

Job Summary

The Senior Systems Administrator will responsible for performing day-to-day activities required to administer VDI in support of end-users. The duties of this position are to provide broad spectrum tasks associated with managing the VMware VDI components in conjunction with other teams. The candidate will be required to work both independently and collaboratively to address incidents, problems, provide access management, and contribute to infrastructure enhancement projects. The candidate, in conjunction with team goals, will operate the VMware VDI to include tasks such as the configuration of new desktop images, deployment of application packages, optimization of the virtual environment, as well as standard maintenance on the managed products as appropriate.

The Senior Systems Administrator will also contribute to the day-to-day management of the virtualization infrastructure running on a Cisco UCS compute platform and EMC storage. Additional responsibilities may include the assisting the User Support Services team in the optimization of their standard configurations for a virtualized infrastructure. As with any operational role, monitoring alerts, managing the ticket queue, and keeping documentation up to date are a regular part of daily responsibilities. Candidate is required to have strong analysis and decision-making skills with the ability to participate in technical cross-functional meetings, strong commitment to process, and understanding of change and configuration management principles. Candidate must be willing to provide 24/7 coverage (on-call rotation) and participate in after-hours updates and patching on a rotational basis.

Responsibilities and Duties

Operation and maintenance of the enterprise VMware VDI environment

Administration of VMware’s underlying hardware components including updates and patching

Provide Engineering, Administration and Troubleshooting support for all technical matters related to Horizon 7.x VDI

Create, Modify, Administrate and troubleshooting of desktop pools for end users ensuring desktop resources available at all times

Monitoring and Administration of storage resources. Removing corrupt or invalid linked clone or instant clone entries from ADAM database and/or datastores as needed

Participate in after-hours shifts that respond to business emergency requests (on-call rotation)

Participate in after-hours monthly patching rotation

Establish project requirements and document high-level project plans, such as the deployment of new use cases to VDI

Installations of new software and system upgrades including evaluation and installation of patches

Actively monitor systems and resolve issues

Collaborate with the rest of the team to perform project tasks in support of large projects

Qualifications and Skills

Bachelor's Degree and 3+ years of relevant experience

Practical experience managing enterprise VMware VDI (Horizon) environment

Hands on experience troubleshooting common VDI issues​​​​​​

Application deployment experience (e.g. SCCM, PowerShell, etc.)

Experience with creating and customizing VDI base Images

Experience with Active Directory endpoint principles, such as group policies, distributed file system shares, end-user profile management

Ability to learn new products and technologies

Excellent written and oral communication skills

Outstanding customer service and time management skills

Demonstrated ability of end-to-end problem management and ownership

Ability to create and manage work instructions, system and project documentation

Requires a solid understanding of Horizon (VDI)

5 years professional experience in a client facing role supporting VMware solutions and associated technologies.

3 - 6 years of experience in managing Windows systems in an enterprise production environment using VMWare

2 - 4 years experience with Virtual Desktop deployment strategies

5+ years experience with Windows server 2012 and Windows 10 desktop platforms

Comprehensive understanding of Windows Active Directory, Groups and Policies