Infrastructure & Virtualization Engineer · VMware · Backup & DR · Security Operations
I own the infrastructure layer on my own — VxRail, backup, Windows and Linux at OS level — for a managed-services estate of five datacentres. My colleagues own network and applications; the layer underneath them is mine.— what the job actually is, day to day.
10+ years building and running private cloud on VMware — vSphere, NSX, vSAN, VxRail and the vRealize/Aria suite — on Cisco UCS, Dell PowerEdge and Nutanix hardware, with the backup and disaster-recovery layer underneath it. Three of those years ran a bank's private cloud — 3,000+ VMs across eight vCenters, onto which 16+ tenant companies were onboarded; the current role is the infrastructure layer of a five-datacentre managed-services estate.
The current role also carries the security layer, hands-on: credentialed Tenable Nessus scans built and run directly, with findings closed across whole fleets by scripted remediation written in-house; Microsoft Defender for Endpoint and Splunk SIEM coverage proven by triggering live test events and counting what arrives, rather than accepted because the software is installed. It has also meant building the isolated environment for a ransomware assessment, designing and standing up a two-tier internal PKI, and setting up a two-source baseline for reconciling EDR-side and scanner-side vulnerability data.
The pattern that repeats across the work is not button-clicking: it is taking a fault down to the layer where it actually lives — a driver and firmware pairing, a certificate chain, a Fibre Channel fabric login, a systemd override, a partition setting in BIOS — and carrying it through with the vendor until it is closed.
Both Data Domain appliances went from 91% to about 46% used. Retention on all 43 protection policies was redesigned to a grandfather-father-son scheme and 40,078 expired copies removed, with the newest copy of every asset preserved.
e& UAE · 2026What the security team read as an attack was a monitoring probe retrying a wrong password against ten servers, three of them domain controllers. Separated two teams' half-pictures, fixed the credential and verified failed logons at zero on the domain controllers, with no service outage at any point.
e& UAE · 2026Built and ran credentialed Tenable Nessus scans directly, confirming from the scanner's own output that root escalation had succeeded. After patching, a like-for-like re-scan showed high-severity findings down from five to zero and the host risk score from 6,471 to 1,161.
e& UAE · 2026Planned the multi-day campaign with Dell ProSupport and built a compliance baseline across 26 devices. Management-cluster sleds were updated in maintenance-mode batches, then the fabric and Fibre Channel switches one at a time, so host connectivity and storage stayed up throughout.
Bank Misr · 2025Four machines on a dedicated assessment network across two datacentres, so detection and response could be exercised with no path to production. Containment was verified, not assumed: adapters disconnected so a reboot cannot reconnect them, and a sweep of the segment found only the assessment machines alive.
e& UAE · 2026Traced offline Fibre Channel adapters across blade, chassis and SAN switch: a fabric login failure, a driver newer than the certified pairing, flapping switch ports. When the fault returned after a fresh ESXi install, swapping two blades between slots showed it followed the slot.
Bank Misr · 2024Single sign-on, 30 hypervisors, 101 Linux and 32 Windows servers, each by a method that never put the value on a command line and each verified by a fresh login, not an exit code. The sweep also corrected the records: the account was on 23 Windows hosts, not the 4 documented.
e& UAE · 2026Reduced an assessment of 401 open findings across 128 assets to 15 action items, then closed the team's share with scripted remediation reused across three assessment rounds. When a high-severity flaw hit the log forwarder, all 50 forwarders were upgraded the week it was published.
e& UAE · 2026Application, database, RecoverPoint for VMs replication and VMware layers switched over and back with a single action, using PowerCLI checks he had configured in the orchestration platform. The team noted it ran faster than the usual manual procedure.
Bank Misr · 2025The Bank Misr years are documented as a working log rather than a summary: 248 distinct activities across 25 products, spanning May 2024 – January 2026, each one dated and tied to the systems it touched. 204 distinct vendor support-case references appear across them — Dell Technologies, Broadcom/VMware, Veritas, Cisco, IBM, Huawei and OpenText.
Every entry is dated and tied to the platform it touched, the vendor case it ran through and the state it ended in. Nothing there is a claim without work behind it. Full technical detail is available on request under NDA.