How many Mac's are you managing?

@hasaanh
holy smokes!

22,000 Intel Mac's managed by two Casper Admins at the Anchorage School District. We have 100+ sites, with 100+ distribution points, clustered JSS environment, and I forgot to say 1000+ iOS devices. With the dedicated Casper support staff of two, there are some area's that we tend to feel like could use some more TLC but we as a department have SLA's with our customers to be prompt in certain area's and in other area's we do other things quarterly, semi-annually and annually. This way we can attempt to put the necessary time into preparing quality rather than quantity. Being a school district we leverage the summer months heavily for testing and quality assurance especially with the annual OS releases from Apple.

600 in management, about that many not yet managed. I'm on a two-man team that splits Engineering (plus some Architecture) and Operations. I end up doing a little escalated support here and there, but mainly we keep up and I stay out of that save for advising the Ops guy occasionally (he's sharp; rarely needs it). The field support folks are Windows techs with very little Mac experience, save for a couple.

The scale of your org, there's no wonder you're behind. I'd expect there would be a dedicated Architect, two Engineers, a team handling Operations and Escalations (at least two, but with unskilled techs, they'll be busy).

About 250 Macs. No iOS devices yet, (but that's coming soon). One campus. I'm the primary Casper Administrator in terms of configuration, packaging, and policy management, and 5 other members of the Help Desk assist me with Mac incident ticket resolution. We're 70% Windows, 30% Mac, in our managed environment.

I think hasannh wins.....

Yeah, Anchorage SD is one of the largest Casper installations out there, and one of the older ones as well I believe. Pretty amazing...

@hasaanh
How many versions of OSX are you supporting?

Two version's, 10.6.8 and 10.8.2, only because we have about 9,000 machines that currently do not meet the Mountain Lion minimum requirements. About 4,000 just need more RAM (which we are working on), and the other 5,000 just missed the "iMac (Mid 2007 or newer)" mark.

@hasaanh - That's impressive. Since you're K-12, mind sharing who your web filter is? Do you filter remotely (students have laptops at home)? We struggle with filtering and always find ourselves the Mac customer guinea pig with whatever company we try.

@CasperSally - We use M86, which I believe is now called Trustwave, basically when a machine attempts to access the internet the installed client first pings our outside firewall, if there is no response internet connectivity on that machine is shutdown, if there is a response then all client internet traffic is routed through our webfilter in the DMZ and effectively filtered. We had this working at a middle school that had about 500 1-to-1 laptops. But that setup was back in the 10.5-10.6 days, not sure if the vendor still supports this setup on 10.7+, as we currently do not have any 1-to-1 laptop deployments.

@hasaanh Dude, are you slackin'?! Didn't you have 28,000 a year ago? ;)

22,000 Intel Mac's managed by two Casper Admins at the Anchorage School District. We have 100+ sites, with 100+ distribution points, clustered JSS environment, and I forgot to say 1000+ iOS devices. With the dedicated Casper support staff of two, there are some area's that we tend to feel like could use some more TLC but we as a department have SLA's with our customers to be prompt in certain area's and in other area's we do other things quarterly, semi-annually and annually. This way we can attempt to put the necessary time into preparing quality rather than quantity. Being a school district we leverage the summer months heavily for testing and quality assurance especially with the annual OS releases from Apple.

Hey Don :), that 6,000 machine difference was me getting rid of all the old PPC's, we shipped them off to the great landfill in the sky.

Pretty sure Google is probably using something like Simian / Munki for what they're doing.

@hkim Blasphame!!! :D

Pretty sure Google is probably using something like Simian / Munki for what they're doing.

Would be nice if Ed Marczak chimed in to tell us how many Macs they have. I'm guessing a couple'a million... ;)

Don

The guy who used to admin Google now works for Puppet Labs. Fairly sure they're using that. (ick).

google uses puppet for most config management and simian (munki) for updates, i believe.

an old interview with luke (ceo, puppetlabs) and nigel (ex-google, now puppetlabs): http://redmonk.com/cote/2008/06/11/puppet-at-google-redmonk-radio-episode-48/

google engineer talking about using puppet at scale during his talk at puppetconf: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A8mbMjlr_b0

they've never published numbers of managed clients, but it's well into the thousands, globally distributed.

remember that outside of this market, casper is basically unknown. during a recent job interview, the interviewer asked "what's jamf casper suite?" the job's not related to mac admin, so i should have removed it from my résumé.

regardless, don't knock puppet. it's a powerful tool. i know this audience is biased, but try to keep an open mind about tooling.

@rockpapergoat wrote:

i know this audience is biased, but try to keep an open mind about tooling.

Great point, it's more about standards than tools. Example, we loathe Composer (sorry JAMF!) since it lacks the ability to easily add logic (HW/SW requirements, etc.), so we use Packages or PackageMaker since they both follow Apple's guidelines. Can't let yourself get "locked in" or your continuity goes out the window because you've limited your flexibility going forward. So whether Casper or Puppet or whatever, I'd worry less about tool/framework and focus more on following Apple standards.

http://s.sudre.free.fr/Software/Packages/about.html

PS, I really wish JAMF would swing a deal with Sudré to roll Packages into the Casper Suite. :)

Don

@don

on a broader scale, i'm interested in fostering the adoption of a lingua franca for configuration management. every group handles these problems in its own way. this applies to groups managing windows, linux, os x, solaris, etc. it's not unique to platform. any tools that help provide a common language to describe systems and configurations are more valuable than ones that aren't portable across platforms or lock you into the vendor's particular way of doing things.

this is a bigger topic and also off-topic in this thread.

related: roll os x packages with fpm: http://macops.ca/rolling-os-x-packages-with-fpm-and-homebrew/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=rolling-os-x-packages-with-fpm-and-homebrew

Good to see that some sites are using Casper to manage 22,000+ OS X devices. We are currently past our evaluating of Casper and on to Pilot. If all goes well we will start off managing 30,000 Macs and expect that to double in 2 yrs time.

@clarkml
How many people do you have helping with Mac management?

~400 Macs, ~1800 iPads (at time of post, who knows after they multiply like bunnies tomorrow...), 1 Apple Admin (myself), and 2 0.5 FTE techs.

So roughly I am at a 600 machine ratio per person (assuming each tech counts as one, regardless of their 0.5 status)

I'm currently only managing 130+ Macs which i expect to grow rapidly once they get approved as a standard device. I am lucky enough to have a group which handles imaging and deployment of new Mac device and another group which handles re-imagining.

Hello Guys, im new to JAMF and do not currently have Casper suite, I type this as sit in my hotel room after the JNUC party at aria, anyways, We currently have roughly around 400 or so macs in my environment, managed by myself and another service desk technician for about 5 years now. Mostly using ARD, some use of composer, but mostly, mom and pop support , putting out fires ect. The PC base is most likely around 3,000

@Gabriel.Duff you don't need JAMF to manage your Macs effectively. If cost is a concern at the moment look into things like Deploy Studio http://www.deploystudio.com/Home.html
, Munki http://code.google.com/p/munki/
, and many others.

@jhbush1973 thanks. I have used deploy studio before. We have been budgeted to start with 50 seats of Casper suite as a pilot. My co worker has used Munki before so I will touch base with him to compare with Casper suite.