Here is what you do: ; You acknowledge that system administration takes time and effort. If you have more than some 10-15 machines, you ought to automate the w

Here is what you do: ; You acknowledge that system administration takes time and effort. If you have more than some 10-15 machines, you ought to automate the work of keeping them in sync. You want to minimize effort of administration. ; You install something along the lines of puppet from http://reductivelabs.com http://reductivelabs.com and use that to manage your server infrastructure. ; You install a monitoring suite for the infrastructure. Ganglia is popular when the servers are forming a cluster. With the above, any reasonable operating system will work, be it .deb/.rpm based linux distros, *BSD, or OSX (I honestly don't know how to do this properly in Windows).