ERIC LEE FRITSCH

Professional Summary

Strategic and hands-on Senior IT Systems Engineer with over 20 years of experience designing, securing, and automating hybrid enterprise infrastructure. Proven leader of a 20+ engineer global team, driving major initiatives including Proxmox and VMware migrations, data center consolidations, and unified systems monitoring. Skilled in asset lifecycle management, including Zabbix-PagerDuty integrations and openDCIM deployment. Adept at orchestrating high-stakes, cross-team maintenance operations, optimizing uptime, and aligning IT solutions with business-critical goals.

Core Competencies

Team Leadership & Staff Development • Infrastructure Automation • Proxmox VE • VMware vSphere & ESX • Hybrid Cloud (AWS, HPE GreenLake) • Bash, PowerShell, Python Scripting • STP & MTU Optimization • Data Center Migration • SFTP & Chroot Security • SAN & NAS Storage • DNS/DHCP/Active Directory • Network Architecture • Zabbix/Grafana Monitoring • Development Infrastructure • Team Leadership & Mentorship • Disaster Recovery & High Availability

Professional Experience

Senior Systems Engineer – Hewlett Packard Enterprise (2011–Present)

• Subject Matter Expert and technical coach for junior team members while directing team projects and Service-Level Agreements.
• Lead a team of Systems Administrators responsible for supporting software development teams for local and remote datacenters.
• Write automation scripts used to proactively monitor lab infrastructure for reduced Recover Time Objectives.
• Manage infrastructure monitoring with Zabbix while integrating with PagerDuty alerting
• Lead migration projects consisting of datacenter consolidation, local risk networks, system re-IP, storage, and compute.
• Manage core infrastructure including network architectures, VMware clusters, DNS/DHCP servers, storage arrays, SAN networks, L2/L3 network switches, firewalls, proxy servers and monitoring tools.
• Continuously create, maintain, and troubleshoot complex test environments in a 50,000 square foot heterogeneous datacenter using HPE’s entire fleet of hardware and “next generation” prototypes.
• Implementation of Open-Source solutions such as Squid proxy, KVM, ProxMox, and Zabbix monitoring.
• Constantly learning innovative technologies from the rudimentary stages of development through final product releases.
• Project planning, budgetary advice, lab space management, hardware purchasing, shipment receiving, hardware setup, system maintenance, and equipment recycling.

Systems Engineer – Dish Network (1997–2011)

• Travel to multiple remote uplink center locations to provide datacenter inspections, infrastructure design, production builds and ongoing maintenance.
• Systems Engineer in a mixed OS environment consisting of physical and virtual Linux and Windows servers.
• Linux/Windows System’s Engineer for the Dish Network’s Conditional Access System while maintaining zero production downtime.
• Windows domain management including Active Directory, Group Policy, Exchange, DNS, DHCP, IIS and Terminal Services.
• VMware ESX/vSphere virtualization configuration and management
• Management of application upgrades and migrations across multiple platforms in a real-time production environment.
• Lead engineer for multiple projects including hardware upgrades, hardware infrastructure design and deployment, 3rd party software testing and process improvement.
• Participate in a 24x7 on-call rotation to ensure the stability and integrity of operations and quickly troubleshoot and analyze failures to minimize outages and service interruptions.

Key Achievements

• Patent filing for customizable datacenter monitoring architecture
• Re-IP’d 15,000+ systems with minimal downtime
• Led VMware to Proxmox migration for critical workloads
• Developed custom automation for power, cooling, and networking layers
• Traveled to remote datacenters to lead infrastructure setup
• Coordinated sequenced power-down strategies across global environments

Certifications & Education

• AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate
• AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner
• AWS Partner: Architecting & Technical
• VMware ESX (AmeriTeach)
• Microsoft Exchange & Server 2003 (Global Knowledge)
• IBM AIX Virtualization
• MCSE – Microsoft Networking Essentials
• B.A., Criminal Justice – University of Wyoming
• A.A., Pre-Law – Laramie County Community College

Technical Skills

• Operating Systems: Linux, Windows, Proxmox, VMware
• Cloud Platforms: AWS, HPE GreenLake, Compute Ops Management
• Asset Management: openDCIM
• Languages: Bash, Python, PowerShell
• Monitoring: Zabbix, Grafana, SNMP, Syslog
• Networking: Fortigate Firewall, Squid, LACP, NAT, Wireshark, VLAN, SAN
• Storage: HPE 3PAR, Nimble, Alletra, Primera, EVA, MSA
• Switching & Routing: Cisco, Brocade, Aruba, HPE, ProCurve, 3Com
• Software: Active Directory, Group Policy, DNS, DHCP, OneView
• Hardware: HPE Gen10/Gen11/Gen12 Servers, DL360/DL380, Apollo, Synergy, C7000, ILO, Smart Array Controllers