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Number of Servers per Sysadmin

There are a lot of discussion about what is the average number of servers per administrator. The answer depends on several factors (see Number of Servers per Sysadmin)

• What is covered ?. If only OS that's one game, if OS and applications it's another
• How homogeneous are servers ?  If all servers are from the same manufacturer (for example, Dell)  and use single flavor of Unix that's one game. If the company has all flavors of Unix that exist and several types of hardware that's another game.  Generally completely homogeneous environment permit servicing twice as much server as high diversity environment (three or more flavors of Unix and three of more hardware vendors).

If can also we approach this issue from the point of view of in-house costs vs. outsourced cost. If we assume that an outsourced server costs approximately $200 month or $2400 per year, then assuming $72K salary we will have 30 servers per admin.

In general question in its plain vanilla form is very misleading as another variable is the qualification and experience of the administrator(s).  There are "super-administrators" that are capable to carry load of three or more "normal" administrators. Also the load that one admin can carry depends on tools available. With good tools for software distribution, monitoring, log processing and configuration management that load can be at least twice higher then in "plain-vanilla" environment as the work for one server can be easily replicated on another (is simplest case via expect script). For example (RE [SAGE] Servers per SysAdmin):

• 100 homogeneous servers all running the same operating system with centralized authentication and software distribution mechanisms is very manageable with one or two senior administrators. 
• 20 servers running different operating systems on different hardware platforms with varying capacity and performance requirements can be more difficult to manage, and may require two or three administrators. 

Old News ;-)

[SAGE] Servers per SysAdmin by Barnette, Steve L

8 Oct 2001

I am in a staffing discussion on number of SysAdmins needed for our servers.
The suits are quoting some Gardner Group article stating one SysAdmin per
hundred servers.  That sounds high to me, I was wondering what all of you
think?


Steve Barnette
Sr. Systems Engineer
-------------------------------------------------------
# perl -e 'print $i=pack(c5,(41*2),sqrt(7056),(unpack(c,H)-2),oct(115),10);

Re [SAGE] Servers per SysAdmin

As we found out at OSDN, 2 sysadmins can handle 200 servers but you'll run
them ragged doing so, I would say, honestly 50 per sysadmin, 30 if theres
an on-call schedule.

I know, I ended up in the hospital from the stress.

-Trish

RE [SAGE] Servers per SysAdmin

how many sysadmins does it take to screw in a light bulb....  :)

this is very misleading.  it depends what the servers are doing and the
experience of the administrator(s).  100 homogeneous servers all running the
same operating system, with centralized authentication and software
distribution mechanisms is very manageable with one or two senior
administrators.  20 servers running different operating systems on different
hardware platforms with varying capacity and performance requirements can be
more difficult to manage, and may require two or three administrators.  at
my current job, i alone administer 30 servers.  a couple years ago i was at
the university of michigan, where a team of myself and 5 other
administrators managed the same number of machines.  the complexity and
dynamic nature of the services we were offering (login services to 80,000
users!) required us to have more staff.

the moral of the story is, upper management cannot base their staffing
requirements on a simple formula.

-jeff

Re [SAGE] Servers per SysAdmin

Barnette, Steve L <steve_b3@corp.earthlink.net> writes:

> I am in a staffing discussion on number of SysAdmins needed for our
> servers.  The suits are quoting some Gardner Group article stating one
> SysAdmin per hundred servers.  That sounds high to me, I was wondering
> what all of you think?

I think it depends highly on how homogenous your servers are.  If you only
have one to five servers for each application, a hundred servers is
probably way too high; if the hundred servers are a single compute cluster
composed of completely identical machines, with the appropriate automation
a single sysadmin could easily handle that and more.
--
Russ Allbery (rra@stanford.edu)             <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>

Number of Admin's per Server - Database Forum

V Crenshaw writes:

> Have you seen in any of the industry mags with a survery or article that
> talks about the
> optimum number of unix or AIX admins per server?

Unless the workload is very heavy, a single administrator should be
optimal. For mission-critical machines, two people with root access
would probably be wise (although only one might normally carry out all
the administration duties).

For large systems and in cases where responsibility must be divided for
security reasons, you might want several administrators with different
duties. The UNIX architecture doesn't lend itself to this, though,
since you're either root or you're not, so it's all or nothing as
privileges go. There are some creative workarounds, but they involve
allowing ordinary users to run a few privileged programs; the only real
administrators are those with the root password, and anyone with the
root password can do anything.

One of the problems I've always had with UNIX is this all-or-nothing
sysadmin privilege, but it's a problem shared by a great many operating
systems.

--
Transpose hotmail and mxsmanic in my e-mail address to reach me directly.

Number of Admin's per Server - Database Forum

In article ,
"V Crenshaw" wrote:

> I guess I wasn't clear in what I was asking. We have thousands of midrange
> unix servers: SUN, AIX, PYRAMID and HP in the company I work for.
>
> I'm asking how many AIX servers should one admin be responsible for - max.
>
> I'll take opinions, but I'm really asking if anyone has seen any written
> opinions from industry writers and magazines.

"That depends" (the standard answer to overly general and not well
understood by the the Original Poster)

There's no hard and fast formula and most PHBs are looking for one
thinking sysadmins are like widgets. Guess what, they aren't. Good
ones know the systems they run and keep them running well, like a Kabuki
stagehand who's seen on stage but not really seen.

Factors that affect sysadmin ratio:

- environment and service level expectations (7x24 production under
tight change controls with measured up-time (4 Nines 5 or better=130s
downtime/month), development, or available during standard business
hours)
- workload (heavily used mission-critical with HA, critical -
infrastructure system like directory services or web, or developer
systems),
- utilization patterns (system load creeps toward double digits just
before lunch, dips, then goes back up until about 5pm),
- applications care and maintainance ("Oracle is running slow", "Why is
the company web page so slow today", "I need files restored that were on
my PC")
- hardware configuration (disk space requirements, memory utilization,
older or questionable hardware)
- software configuration (OS version and patch levels)
- degree of infrastructure automation and monitoring (if there isn't
any, you're in deep dodo!)

If you have groups of systems that are similar running about the same
hardware, then one or two people could handle the similar systems (say
the DB2 systems). The more different the systems are, the less overlap
you'll be able to depend on. It also depends on the degree of
cross-pollination that occurs between the various sysadmins. If they
are a cohesive group and work together as a team, then you get synergy.
If they're scatter all over the enterprise, there's probably very little
overlap, except for various infrastructure services like the Datacenter
and Network people that can mandate various things.

The Practice of System and Network Adminstration by Thomas Limoncelli
and Christine Hogan (ISBN 0201702711) has an excellent discussion of
this whole topic from a general, system-independent architecture.

--
DeeDee, don't press that button! DeeDee! NO! Dee...

==

Number of Admin's per Server - Database Forum

In comp.unix.admin Michael Vilain :
> In article ,
> "V Crenshaw" wrote:

>> I guess I wasn't clear in what I was asking. We have thousands of midrange
>> unix servers: SUN, AIX, PYRAMID and HP in the company I work for.
>>
>> I'm asking how many AIX servers should one admin be responsible for - max.
>>
>> I'll take opinions, but I'm really asking if anyone has seen any written
>> opinions from industry writers and magazines.

> "That depends" (the standard answer to overly general and not well
> understood by the the Original Poster)

Or just refused, cowardly unwilling to except reality.

> There's no hard and fast formula and most PHBs are looking for one
> thinking sysadmins are like widgets. Guess what, they aren't. Good
> ones know the systems they run and keep them running well, like a Kabuki
> stagehand who's seen on stage but not really seen.

100% ack. There's no way of determining this in a general way,
even if management would like to. It could be 150 or more systems
in an easy environment or just 25, with a bunch of developers on
them, keeping the admin pretty busy.

[..]

I found some good information in
. Granted it
assumes the org has bought into using Tivoli, but there's some good
content in there that can give rise to thoughts that should be applied
to an organization, irrespective of whatever tools (or tool suites) are
actually deployed. They provide some good analysis of the different
trade spaces that occur in any environment.

Recently, I was able to play around with AIX's System Manager. I'm not
saying it's any kind of silver bullet, but IMO they've done a nice job
of allowing multiple nodes to be centrally managed. I haven't played
with it extensively, but I'd like to see a similar interface work in a
heterogenous environment, for at least the portions which are common
across many a Unix platform.

Regards,
Jon

How many administrators needed per site - comp.unix.admin Google Groups

This is a discussion on Number of Admin's per Server within the unix-admin forums in Operating Systems category; I'm new to the group. I've looked at the FAQ's and archives and can't find anything referencing this so I have a question. Have you seen in any of the industry mags with a survery or article that talks about the optimum number of unix or AIX admins per server? I know servers have different levels of complexity etc. but I'm looking for some data to see what is generally done in the real world. If you recall seeing something and are not really sure, would you tell me where you likely saw it, ie. ...

I'm new to the group. I've looked at the FAQ's and archives and can't find anything referencing this so I have a question.

Have you seen in any of the industry mags with a survery or article that talks about the optimum number of unix or AIX admins per server?

I know servers have different levels of complexity etc. but I'm looking for some data to see what is generally done in the "real world."

If you recall seeing something and are not really sure, would you tell me where you likely saw it, ie. what
mags you might have seen it in or website etc.?

VCrenshaw

 02-05-2005, 06:09 PM

V Crenshaw writes:

> Have you seen in any of the industry mags with a survery or article that
> talks about the
> optimum number of unix or AIX admins per server?

Unless the workload is very heavy, a single administrator should be
optimal. For mission-critical machines, two people with root access
would probably be wise (although only one might normally carry out all
the administration duties).

For large systems and in cases where responsibility must be divided for
security reasons, you might want several administrators with different
duties. The UNIX architecture doesn't lend itself to this, though,
since you're either root or you're not, so it's all or nothing as
privileges go. There are some creative workarounds, but they involve
allowing ordinary users to run a few privileged programs; the only real
administrators are those with the root password, and anyone with the
root password can do anything.

One of the problems I've always had with UNIX is this all-or-nothing
sysadmin privilege, but it's a problem shared by a great many operating
systems.

--
Transpose hotmail and mxsmanic in my e-mail address to reach me directly.

 02-05-2005, 07:57 PM