Bert Smets

Curriculum vitae

Infrastructure engineer with 25 years of hands-on experience running VMware and Windows Server estates and moving them into hybrid cloud. I design platforms that stay up, automate the work that keeps them that way, and write the runbooks so the next person can too.

Contact me

Bert Smets, Bilzen, Limburg, Belgium. Contact via bertsmets.be/contact

Experience

  1. 2021present

    Site Reliability Engineer, Senior System Engineer and IT Architect

    Kyndryl Belgium, Brussels

    • Design and run hybrid cloud infrastructure for enterprise clients (VMware, Windows Server, public cloud).
    • Define SLOs, SLAs, monitoring and incident response for business-critical platforms.
    • Root Cause Analysis and Capacity management
    • Architect migrations and lifecycle upgrades with minimal downtime.
  2. 20132021

    Wintel System Engineer / Teamleader

    IBM Belgium, Brussels

    • Build and operate large multi-tenant VMware vSphere environments for managed-service clients.
    • Windows Server, Active Directory and patch management at scale.
    • Datacenter migration
    • 2nd and 3rd level on-site support
    • As teamleader : Planning meeting, follow-up of internal projects, issues, ...
  3. 20042013

    Wintel System Engineer

    IBM Belgium

    • Build, manage, support Wondows server environments
    • Virtualizations to ESX environments, P2V migrations
    • Disaster recovery, backup managment
    • Skill transfer towards an offshore support team, coordination with remote teams
    • Building and managing HA environments, clustering using Microsoft and Veritas tools
  4. 20012003

    Distributed Systems Operator

    IBM Belgium, Brussels

    • Monitoring of Windows, Linux, Unix and SAP systems
    • Simple problem analysis en corrective actions, dispatching to second-level support
    • Backup monitoring
    • Service desk outside business hours
  5. 20002001

    Unix Operator

    Evosoft, Brussels

    • Backup monitoring
    • Job management (start/stop/monitoring)
    • Tape handling

Skills

Virtualisation
VMware vSphere, vCenter, Site Recovery Manager, VCF
Windows
Windows Server, Active Directory, Group Policy, PowerShell
Cloud
Hybrid cloud, Azure/AWS/Google
Reliability
SLOs and error budgets, Monitoring, Incident management, Capacity planning, Root Cause Analysis
Security
Server Hardening, Vulnerability Scanning, Fortinet Firewalls, Palo Alto Firewalls

Certifications

  • VMware Certified Specialist – Cloud Foundation (2023 & 2024)
  • VMware Certified Professional – Data Center Virtualization (2019 & 2013)
  • CompTIA Security+ (2025)
  • ISC2 Certified in Cybersecurity (2026)
  • Fortinet Certified Associate Cybersecurity (2025)
  • Google Professional Cloud Architect (2021)
  • AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner
  • Microsoft Azure Fundamentals

Education

  • Bachelor - Applied Computer Science, Provinciale Hogeschool Limburg (2000)
  • Cybersecurity Engineer, SyntraPXL (2025)

Languages

  • Dutch (Native)
  • English (Professional)
  • French (Working knowledge)