Comments on: How Many Servers Can One Admin Manage?

By: WS

WS — Tue, 06 Sep 2011 21:15:21 +0000

As others have hit upon, the number of servers is irrelevant – it is the configuration, the purpose, etc. Obviously, one server may do only one purpose, e.g. DNS, that is simple to deal with and which also might be automated. But if you work in a shop with complex and diverse configurations, and no budget for automation tools, then the amount of support per server will increase. Are the servers virtual or physical? That’s another variable. Internal users or external? etc. In other words, “number of servers per admin” is a meaningless number – can’t be applied across different environments. And that doesn’t even touch on who is a “server admin”.

By: Public versus private clouds for dev/test « blog.melski.net

Public versus private clouds for dev/test « blog.melski.net — Wed, 27 Oct 2010 17:42:35 +0000

[...] how much of a sysadmin’s time will be spent managing these servers. Data from multiple sources shows that a sysadmin can maintain at least 100 servers, particularly if they are homogeneous as [...]

By: Phil

Phil — Mon, 21 Jun 2010 05:41:56 +0000

At my company we manage around 800 dedicated servers and 200 virtual servers, since it’s a web host about 80% of those are unique/standalone/require you to remember somewhat what makes them different. We have a lot of standardization in place which makes life easier. But there is typically only one man working on each shift handling all technical aspects of the business (support/alert response/full management (i.e. no matter what happens to the site/server it’s our problem and you need to know how to fix it). During busier shifts we have 2 men working.

By: bob

bob — Tue, 11 May 2010 19:51:57 +0000

I’ve seen the # alot lower in environments where poor standards were implemented. More like 1:20 server ratio. The problem is nobody has the vision to automate tasks in the beginning where they could support a 1:1000 servers.

By: rmxz

rmxz — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 18:01:05 +0000

Totally the wrong metric.

Managing 700 servers or 7000 servers is about the same work so long as they’re identically configured.

Wouldn’t a better metric be “how many sysadmins per distinct server configuration”.

By: roberto

roberto — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 18:02:08 +0000

“Our ratio is 1 per 300 servers”.

Not sure how that is possible. The person is either superman or your servers are a mess.

By: Austin

Austin — Sat, 02 Jan 2010 04:18:32 +0000

Our ratio is 1 per 300 servers. Or about 1 per 1 million accounts. We use a lot of virtualization.

By: Chunen

Chunen — Sat, 02 Jan 2010 01:22:15 +0000

Shouldn’t the question be:

“What is the ratio of Sysadmins-to-UniqueServerConfigurations?”

For example, you could have a front end web-server farm with 100 identical servers, a second level with 25 identical application servers, and a third level with 10 identical databases. This may require 3 admins for 3 unique server configs to a ratio of 1:1.

Compare this with 135 unique configurations managed by x admins.

The question could be further refined the operations organization was divided into separate backup, resource monitoring and integrity monitoring groups.

By: clakre thomas

clakre thomas — Thu, 31 Dec 2009 20:10:52 +0000

at my former company 2 of use managed 160+ servers. 40 of which were standalone & 120+ were virtual. Plus we managed the SANs.

Depends how resource/fail intensive the job is. As we were solely handling internal operations for the company our load was much lower than if we were handling Internet operations.

For the most part 98% of our system was low maintenance, there were a few applications which constantly hiccup’d. We only were strained when a major system needed to be rebuilt over several days

By: Daniel Matthis

Daniel Matthis — Thu, 31 Dec 2009 15:17:36 +0000

One problem with the “how many servers can one admin handle” really depends on how the server is managed, what type of server it is, and the it staff structure around those systems. In the SMB world many sysadmin’s double as the appadmin in which case the number depends on the number of apps and servers not just servers.

Other place like Microsoft probably have sysadmins who take care of just the OS and relegate app duties to an analyst some place. Thus they have a couple of standard OS to support a huge cluster of servers. Give an admin one app, one OS configuration to support and automation can allow them to handle hundreds if not thousands. The moment he takes on an app and multiple OS configurations that number drops exponentially.