Independent IT consultant. I design and automate the infrastructure layer — virtualization, infrastructure as code, networking and monitoring — and I write about the journey, on servers and across the world.
I'm Ringo Gierth, the person behind IT Consulting Gierth and it-dd.net. My work lives in the mission-critical layer: hypervisors, storage, networks and monitoring — and the automation that keeps all of it reproducible instead of hand-built.
I'm open-source-first and IaC-driven. If it can be described in Terraform, Ansible or Puppet, it shouldn't be clicked together by hand. I run a personal lab spanning home and a datacenter, treated like production — the proving ground for everything I recommend to clients.
That same instinct for figuring things out — and documenting them — has run on my blog since 2008: “a never ending story.”
Vendor-certified across the platforms I actually run — networking, virtualization, storage, databases and process.
A complete, self-assessed inventory — grouped by domain and tiered by depth. Filter by level to see where I go deepest.
A few representative projects. Client names withheld — the patterns are the point.
Moved an entire monitoring estate off PRTG onto open-source Icinga 2 — provisioned with Terraform, configured with Ansible, and backed by InfluxDB for metrics. Master built from scratch, agents rolled out host by host, plugin sets packaged as reusable roles, notifications wired up — and PRTG switched off in July 2026. Reproducible, version-controlled and documented throughout.
Migrated production virtualization farms from Citrix XenServer 6.x/7.x to XCP-ng with no downtime — automating the hypervisor layer with Ansible and Puppet, managed end-to-end through Xen Orchestra.
Automated the complete configuration of F5 load balancers with Ansible — turning manual, error-prone changes into reviewable, repeatable infrastructure as code.
Automated a high-traffic webshop platform with Ansible and Puppet across three identical environments of up to ~30 servers each — kept reproducible and free of configuration drift.
Built the cloud infrastructure for an AI / enterprise-search startup from the ground up with Ansible — across OVH bare-metal, Azure and AWS — integrating several development teams onto one reproducible platform.
Technical notes live here on it-dd.net — the travel stories live on at blog.it-dd.net.
The blog started as a travelogue — the USA in 2008, a trip around the world in 2012 — proof the curiosity that drives the IT work doesn't switch off at the office door.
Consulting enquiry, a tricky virtualization or monitoring migration, or just a good tech conversation — the inbox is open.
info@it-dd.net