As you start to plan out the deployment of Operations Manager 2007 R2 in your organization, you will likely be faced with many questions. How many management servers do I need? What sort of hardware do I need for them? How much storage do I need for the data warehouse? These questions are important to understand (and to be able to answer) to maximize the return on your hardware investment. You'll want to ensure you have room to grow, but at the same time you don't want to waste money by going "overboard" and end up with significant idle resources.
One key thing to look out for, is the difference between monitoring agent based Windows machines, and monitoring Unix/Linux machines. An agent based Windows machine can manage its workflows locally, but since a Unix/Linux machine does not have a HealthService locally, the workflows will run on the management server that owns that Unix/Linux machine. As a general guideline, a management server can handle about 5 times the number of agent based Windows machines as it can Unix/Linux machines. A quad proc machine with 8GB of RAM, and a 4 disk RAID 10 array can handle about 2500 agent based Windows machines, but only about 500 Unix/Linux machines.
Remember that this isn't a cut and dry number. As the hardware varies, so will the capabilities of the management server, so adjust those numbers accordingly. These numbers assume that you are monitoring more than just the base OS (AD, Exchange, SQL, IIS, MySQL, Apache, Oracle, etc). However, the application layers can significantly influence the number of running workflows. If a machine has a huge Oracle deployment with many instances, hundreds of tablespaces, sessions, and processes this is going to affect the number of machines a management server can handle. In this example, the original capacity of 500 Unix/Linux machines, may have now fallen to 250 or less.
Luckily, Microsoft has provided some guidance to help out with planning deployments. They have created an interactive document that walks you through various scenarios and outlines the required hardware for that deployment. You can get the document here:
http://blogs.technet.com/momteam/archive/2009/08/12/operations-manager-2007-r2-sizing-helper.aspx
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