Senior VMWare ESXi/Linux Red Hat Admin

Hi,

Title: Senior VMWare ESXi/Linux Red Hat Admin

Location: Houston Texas (4 days onsite, 1 day remote)

Work Authorization: Any

Type of Hire: Contract (6+ months)

Start Date: Immediate

Key Responsibilities:

• Lead vulnerability remediation activities across VMware ESXi clusters, vCenter, and associated virtualization components.
• Perform ESXi patching, upgrades, and lifecycle management using VMware Lifecycle Manager (vLCM).
• Execute remediation of critical vulnerabilities (CVEs) across hypervisors and supporting infrastructure within defined SLAs.
• Plan and implement rolling upgrades for ESXi hosts in clustered production environments with zero/minimal downtime.
• Perform RHEL (8.x, 9.x) and SUSE (12.x, 15.x) OS patching, upgrades, and migrations.
• Design and implement automated patching using Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform (AAP).
• Create, test, and maintain Ansible playbooks and workflows for Linux and ESXi remediation activities.
• Conduct root cause analysis for patching failures, performance degradation, and host instability issues.
• Perform firmware and BIOS upgrades for server hardware hosting ESXi (including HMC and CECs where applicable).
• Manage filesystem, user administration, kernel tuning, and performance troubleshooting in heterogeneous Linux/AIX environments.
• Coordinate with infrastructure, storage, and network teams to validate compatibility matrices before upgrades.
• Develop SOPs, remediation runbooks, rollback procedures, and audit documentation for compliance and governance.