How many servers are you responsible for?

At my current job, we have roughly 400 servers total, that includes both physical and virtual. They serve about 3500 users, and we have 14 people to take care of it all. 1 of them is a manager, and 2 are Network Engineers that do mostly routers and switches, so they only have a couple of the servers.

Out of all that, I'm only personally responsible for 23 of them, with a few new ones possibly coming this year.

At my last job I only had about 75 servers in the datacenter for about 6000 users, and I was responsible for all 75 of them.

So for the Systems Administrators out there, how many servers are you responsible for?

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cyberguypr

Team of four babysitting 25 physical servers and 66 virtual at three locations. We have multiple DEV environments that change constantly so we are pretty busy.

ITVince

I do basic monitoring for 30, but thats all

Hypntick

I have no clue honestly. I work for an MSP and we've got quite a few (150+) clients we manage. Anywhere from 1 server per client up to around 20 or so, depending on their size. It's a fairly even mix of physical and virtual as well.

crrussell3

I work in a smaller non-profit with a team of three (IT Manager, Database Admin, and Network/Systems Admin(ME)). I manage all the servers, which consists of 31 servers, with 10 of them being virtual.

dave0212

Currently 3 admins looking after 2 sites, 25+ physical and 2 virtual clusters with somewhere in the region of 250 Virtual servers across production and development environments

rwmidl

Maybe 10-15 physical servers (spread across 1 production domain and two test domains) as well as quite a few virtual servers running various flavors of Windows (2000, XP, 2003 x86/64, 2008, Vista, 7, 2008 R2 and throw in a few flavors of SQL and IIS in the mix).

Mishra

700 total computer accounts in our Enterprise Servers OU.

Looking to double that in 1 year.

SteveLord

-File/print
-Database
-NAS

Shloeb

There are 3,000 servers in total. But there are many teams handling different aspects.

Daniel333

513 servers currently

bertieb

Three overworked consultants looking after approx 120 production servers for numerous clients (all MS) and an internal dev estate consisting of approx 500VM's (though the OEL/RedHat systems are done by another team) for the various practices, thankfully all running on vSphere systems. In addition to managing tons of different brand switches, Cisco/Juniper firewalls, the odd router, a smidge of WAFS appliances, EMC/Hitachi SANs and soon (for reasons that don't quite make sense to me seeing as we have dedicated teams to support SQL Server, Biztalk, Dynamics etc).... Sharepoint server. And being at client sites a lot trying to flog our services and promoting the business etc. Thankfully, I'm managing to get some of the more routine work pushed out to the Offshore teams in India (thats another story!)

I didn't want to be a jack of all trades, especially at this stage in my career even though the variety is great and some of the projects are very interesting. Whilst I'd regard myself as competent and able to pick up a hot brick and run with it, I really do think I'm beginning to spread myself far too thinly now - plus it results in more call-outs as there's more bases to cover - so my next role will certainly be more focussed thats for sure.

Apologies for the semi-rant, can you tell I'm having a bad day? I guess on the bright side, absolutely no desktop systems though!

dave0212

Keeps you busy bertieb

Suprised you havent expanded the team yet, you seem to be adding something new every week.

Glad my remit is only Microsoft and VMware with security/compliance stuck on the side to keep me busy

Everyone

The 23 I counted was only what I'm personally responsible for the configuration and maintenance on. I.E. the ones I touch regularly. I've had to touch almost all of the 400 at one point or another when the person primarily responsible for a system wasn't around, or if it was my turn to be on-call. So those 23 are just my primary, I didn't count systems that I'm secondary on.

I think our Citrix guy probably has the most, we have a stupid amount of Citrix servers. I try to stay away from those, but since I do all the AD, I have to help him with GPOs a lot.

Sounds like we have quite the variety here!

jibbajabba

I am working in a hosting company having server in three different datacenter... No idea .. count is in the 100s and I am technically responsible for all of them. During the day with a team and on call, by myself (hardware and software) .. so no idea really ..

pizzaboy

Small firm 10 servers, about 150 users, 3 international sites.

Everyone

The "no idea" is what made me think of starting this topic. We're trying to address some security concerns, and realized that we have quite a few servers that nobody knows who's responsible for them. So everybody was asked to list the servers they're responsible for, and that will be matched against list of servers we have as a start. Once that's done we can figure out who should be taking care of whatever is left over.

RobertKaucher

pizzaboy wrote: »

Small firm 10 servers, about 150 users, 3 international sites.

We are in a similar situation. 4 person team, around 200 users over several sites in the US, NZ (Christ Church), and India. We have around 15 servers. Most are virtualized. Nearly all are Server 2008 R2. Every team member also does some level of Line-of-Business and BI development with SharePoint, Silverlight, and SQL Server.

aordal

1 person team. 35 virtual servers (vmware) 10 physical servers across 4 sites. + all network equipment

approx 110 users, i work for a small non profit

brad-

Im always bewildered when people say they are responsible for X number of servers and such...cause i always wonder, wtf does that actually mean? Do you do SQL/exchange/Forefront/Sharepoint/AD/GPO/File management/Print management/webmaster...etc? Or, are we just answering the bell when hardware problems arise?

12 servers, 110 users, 5 sites. Everything but software dev and networking above ccent level, but im working on that one.

Zartanasaurus

Servers? ~10ish (DHCP, Web Filtering, WCS, ACS)
L2/L3 Network gear? 60 WLCs, 1,325 APs, ~900 switches, 1 ASA

Everyone

brad- wrote: »

Im always bewildered when people say they are responsible for X number of servers and such...cause i always wonder, wtf does that actually mean? Do you do SQL/exchange/Forefront/Sharepoint/AD/GPO/File management/Print management/webmaster...etc? Or, are we just answering the bell when hardware problems arise?

12 servers, 110 users, 5 sites. Everything but software dev and networking above ccent level, but im working on that one.

Yeah that's why I'm saying 23 that I actually have to do something with on a regular basis... it'd be 400 if we were talking "answering the bell when a hardware problem arises". I'm not talking about being a remote screwdriver, I'm talking actually configuring, administering, and maintaining every aspect of a server.

I do all messaging systems, Exchange, BES, IM (Linux OpenFire server), anti-spam/anti-virus gateways, encryption gateways, AD, DNS, DHCP, Windows File Servers (DFS cluster), Windows Print Servers, a Windows Streaming Media Server and a Linux replacement for it, plus a couple random medical app servers.

Most of my coworkers are responsible for servers with medical applications on them. However if they have a Windows O/S related issue that they can't figure out, I have to help them. We've got a Linux guy now too that does the same thing for our Linux based systems.

Monkerz

As of right now we have the following, but management is looking to consolidate 12 other business units within our company.

7 NOC Employees
5 HD Technicians
Infinite amount of managers
4 MPLS SPs (Sprint, Verizon, TimeWarner, AT&T)
1 Data Center
156 branch offices
472 Servers
10,393 Workstations

Too much network gear to list. :S