Re: Admin's per partition

[Jim Oberholtzer <midrangel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Larry,

That's a big "it depends".  First are some of those partitions 
replicated meaning mirrored pairs?  Are the change control procedures 
such that developers/users can't change things on you?  How many levels 
of OS? (V5, V6 and V7)  What's the upgrade schedule for 
hardware/software in the next two years.  Consoles are all HMC (recent 
versions)?.

Assuming only normal admin functions (and here I refer to the list of 
tasks developed by the SMEs that wrote the IBM i System Administration 
exam   see: http://www-03.ibm.com/certify/certs/04010906.shtml )__. 
<http://www-03.ibm.com/certify/certs/04010906.shtml>  a certified 
administrator should be able to handle 15 or so partitions.  As the 
number of mirrored pairs goes up so would the number of partitions so if 
your 25 has 10 normal HA pairs, then sure 25 might be a good number.  
But I think at that number you have the Admin maxed out, with no room 
for extra hardware upgrades, software upgrades and most certainly very 
little DB/2 tuning and maintenance.

Don't let the powers to be con you into the VMWare admins manage 100s of 
individual instances of Windows.  Each of those is almost always running 
one application, and each of them are smaller machines.  Every time I 
see that I start asking questions about keeping patch levels consistent 
and up to date, also who manages all the security and networking not to 
mention the storage arrays, I get blank stares.  Normally in those 
environments you have an army of people looking after all the moving 
parts whereas with IBM i, you have usually one or two.
<http://www-03.ibm.com/certify/certs/04010906.shtml>

Jim Oberholtzer
Chief Technical Architect
Agile Technology Architects


On 11/19/2013 1:56 PM, Ketzes, Larry wrote:
> I've been asked to provide some type of input regarding Best Practice for how many system admin's would be needed for a specific number of partitions.  They would vary greatly in size, and the first number of partitions given to me is 25.  The partitions would all be in the same time zone so that would not be an issue.
>
> Any thoughts?
>
> Larry Ketzes
> Lead Enterprise Infrastructure Engineer