Can a person handle 500 servers

thiyagu1983

Hi,

Am new to this forum and this is my first thread, recently i got telephone interview, in that Interviewer expecting a person for maintaining 500 servers of their clients. Is that possible for maintaining that much.

Am working in only two physical 2003/2008 servers.

please explain me that how can a person handle that much server.

Regards,
Thi...

ChooseLife

Number is just a number. More important is how many different roles of servers those are. I have a fleet of hundreds of servers under my command that act as one - handling them takes as much work as handling a single standalone server, and vice versa.

thiyagu1983

thanks for response and i answered the same to interviewer...

Lexluethar

Ya depends on your role with those servers. If they are clustered or essentially do the same thing management won't be as difficult. 500 is a lot though, how long would it take one person to patch those? I guess if they aren't in production or clustered you could spend a few weeks and patch them all, but if you had to patch 500 during 'non peak' hours you'd be patching all year long.

rsutton

There is not enough information for anyone to give you a good answer. Questions that you need to find the answers to:
-Are these virtual or physical machines?
-What do these servers do?
-What is the current failure/problem rate that these servers experience?
-How much support are you expected to provide?
-What type of monitoring is setup on the servers?
-Are these all production servers?

You really need to dig in and find out more about the environment & expectations.