How many DBAs you need to manage show in multi-server environment?
This sounds like a joke that "How many DBAs you need to change a light bulb?".
I have come across this less technical question from SSP forum asking for recommended practices. They wanted to have information that How many servers should be managed by a DBA or how many DBAs you need to manage a 400+ SQL Servers within their environment.
I believe there is no direct or straight article or recommended practices to say x number of servers should be managed by a DBA. It completely depends upon how organised your SQL environment is according to me, say with sensible monitoring tools and methods. If it is highly transactional and you keep on getting a lot of issues per day, you obviously need more support and also more important on the business knowledge of those applications. More or less any simple managed task must have a documented place, otherwise you will be losing the plot to recover the system if in case any issues.
Overall DBA job is like fire-fighting, so when the problem occurs your presence is highly-required to resolve the issue. During the less-busy hours (hate to say free) you could monitor the environment and try to fix any loop holes that might hamper the speedy recoverability of any database application whether it is a smaller database or frequently used application.
So in this regard there is no 'specific' benchmarking or specified number to say how many instances can be allocated to a DBA. Say if you have an allocation of resource for a set of SQLinstances for 1 DBA then it will lead to a single point of failure if that DBA is out on leave. It is always better to handle and leave number of instances to all the DBAs within the team and also try to perform a round-robin method to handle the instances by each DBA differently. Rather for such specific business knowledge you could ask corresponding DBA to document to take care if any issue ocurrs.
How many dba's are needed in a sql server environ?
I woud ask list to ask few questions like - "How many SQL Server instnaces you have within your environment", "how busy they will be", "how many of them are 24/7" etc.
This kind of tasking and management of SQL instances within a multi-server environment there isn't any specific reference to say only x number of instances must be allocated to a set of DBAs. Also if the databases management DBA team is really busy then better to allocate installation & configuraiton to a seperate team by defining operability standards in supporting the list of SQL instances.
Further I welcome your feedback to this post in order to keep a reference of best practices that you handle within your environment.