How many Mac's are you managing?

[jllewis]

I recently took over this position managing 16,000+ macs with a staff of two. Just wondering if this is typical since we seem to be constantly behind.....

[jarednichols]

My current job is probably not a good gauge as we're just really beginning worldwide deployment, but at my last job we had about 2000 Macs with 2 admins.

EDIT: I should say 2 Desktop Engineers. There were a number of help desk folks that did Windows and Mac support up through level 2.

[ernstcs]

We have about 500 of them here. I handle the management system and packaging, but we have another employee who is our face to customers in their offices. Granted, the Mac management piece is not full-time for me, I do many other things aside form it. I would say 2 people for that many is likely a bit short, but are you specifically talking all the back end management aspects, or are you also in charge of other tasks from imaging systems to supporting users once the systems are deployed?

[donmontalvo]

Are you counting Help Desk, Desktop Support, Advanced Support, etc.?
Or are you talking about staff to handle Casper packaging, imaging, etc. (IOW infrastructure only)?

[jllewis]

We dont officially do help desk but they call us constantly for help since no one knows anything about Mac's. Same thing with the computer techs. We do all of the Casper/WGM/ConfigurationProfiles setup and management, and also higher level troubleshooting at the desktop level that nobody else can figure out. The computer techs do the imaging but we manage the back-end of that as well, they just use the infrastructure we provide. I have been talking to Administration about expanding our department but was curious if this is the norm.
I appreciate your input.

[bentoms]

Around 150 globally & 200+BYOD iDevices.

2 of us doing all levels of support. I've started to become more project focused.

Company is 1200 strong.

[bentoms]

Around 150 globally & 200+BYOD iDevices.

2 of us doing all levels of support for the macs & BYOD. I've started to become more project focused.

Company is 1200 strong.

[mm2270]

At 16,000+ I would say you should have more than 2 people supporting the environment at an engineering level, Even with a supporting IT staff around that, that seems like too little to me to stay ahead of the curve.

We have over 3000 here and growing. Two of us doing most of the engineering, Casper administration, package and OS building, etc, but a full staff that also helps with general level 1 and 2 support and testing.

[AndyBeaver]

We have about 6500 mac and 5000 iOS devices. 32 locations for our school district with 11 building techs and 2 help desk. It seems as though we always have money for more technology but never enough for more FTE's to support it.

[jllewis]

@AndyBeaver
So you do the management by yourself?

[damienbarrett]

We have about 1200 Macs and 100 iPads (closer to 200 next year) across three campuses. I'm the primary Casper Admin but we have another tech at another campus who is also CCA. Both of us handle the day-to-day repairs, troubleshooting, etc.

With 16,000 Macs, you should have more than 2 people, especially if you're doing more than just Casper administration and packaging (etc.).

[AndyBeaver]

Yes, from a casper standpoint. Policy creation, image creation etc. However building techs are the actual boots on the ground and what you could call tier 1 support. Help desk is more or less tier 2 and then theres me. Most of my time is spent testing and planning as well as ,"putting out fires" so to speak. I maintain the server infrastructure that supports our mac clients alongside two other guys who support the Exchange and various web services environment. But most everyone here is a die hard windows person and do not want to deal with the mac. So a majority of those duties do fall into my lap.

[jllewis]

@AndyBeaver
I feel your pain bro...

[franton]

Eventually about 2000 macs. Currently 400 on Casper and around 1600 on Filewave. (apologies for swearing on this forum with the F word ...)

Big project to implement Casper and eventually replace the F word entirely ... at the same time there's a massive IT shake up going on.

It's always bad news in I.T. Beware of anything claiming to be good news as it's probably a virus!

[jhbush]

We currently have around 900 machines worldwide with an additional 1500-2000 this year. Most of our users are developers so it's more like managing a few thousand due to requirements. On the support side we have one Apple SME who trains Windows techs on how to deploy Macs. We do all of our own repairs in-house as well.

[G-Lo]

I'm on the other end of the spectrum. I manage just under 100 macs for a large advertising agency. I'm the Apple SME in the office but have help from one of our level one techs who I've trained to build packages and image.

I think you'll find that there are at least 4 types of groups using Casper Suite:
1) Large Enterprises > 400 devices
2) School Districts > 400 devices
3) University/Government Labs > 400 devices
4) Advertising Agencies < 200 devices

[donmontalvo]

I wonder if Casper can handle a massive Mac environment like Google? ;)

[blackholemac]

I'm on the small to medium end, though I am the sole Apple guy for the whole district. We handle 200 Macs and about 550 iPads and are constantly growing on the iOS side. We brought in Casper mainly for the iOS side, but I had been wanting it for years on both the Mac and IOS side.

[rob_potvin]

We have 900+ Macs and 200+ iOS devices and I am the main JAMF guy, and all the regular IT Support. Also do a lot of assistant management and project / infrastructure planning.

We have 3 other techs for helpdesk and all the other support 2 of which are trained on the Casper Suite and learning more each day.

We do all our own repairs in house also

[tanderson]

We have 3200 in the JSS right now and will probably peak at 3400. We just added iOS this week and will add a bunch of iOS devices this spring/summer. Right now, it's just me. Packaging, day to day Casper activities, image configurations, and Tier 3 help desk support. Not to mention project management for other IT projects I'm on, planning, testing, infrastructure, vendor relations, etc. for our Mac program. I feel your pain.

[donmontalvo]

When I left my previous job we had 2 Casper admins and a little over 2,200 Macs. iOS was next on the agenda, with clustered virtualized infrastructure expanded to cover AMER/EMEA/APAC, but I left before we got the iOS part going - some lucky guy/gal will get the opportunity to kickstart that baby. :)

Don

[technicholas]

2000+ mac/pcs

[Chris_Hafner]

About 800 Mac's but only about 650 live in field at any given point in time managed by the JSS. As for iOS mobile devices we're only managing a handful for now but have between 1 and 1.5k on campus. Android is another matter. I'm the only CCA here, but we have an overall staff of 6: Manager, IT Coordinator [me], Network Engineer, Database Developer, Hardware Engineer and our fantastic lady at the Help Desk.

[jaferguson]

I'm the Sr. Systems Analyst for our school district. We currently have about 8500 Macs with OS X 10.6.8 - 10.8.2. Our district has decided not to manage iOS devices even though we do support about 2000 right now. I supervise a team of 3 systems analysts each responsible for one of three levels, elementary, middle school and high school. They in turn supervise 2 or 3 computer techs, 7 in all. Our total for Macintosh and Windows computer management - 11. Network management and MIS are separate divisions under the Computer Services Department with their own staff.

[rderewianko]

Just under 300 in my environment.

[hasaanh]

22,000 Intel Mac's managed by two Casper Admins at the Anchorage School District

[AndyBeaver]

@hasaanh
holy smokes!

[hasaanh]

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.

[JPDyson]

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).

[taugust04]

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.

[jllewis]

I think hasannh wins.....

[mm2270]

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

[jllewis]

@hasaanh
How many versions of OSX are you supporting?

[hasaanh]

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.

[CasperSally]

@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.

[hasaanh]

@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.

[donmontalvo]

@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.

[hasaanh]

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.

[hkim]

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

[donmontalvo]

@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