I had the pleasure of being a full time game server admin for about 4 years, running servers for Australia's biggest ISP. I still have the mental scars of dealing with game server software. The company I worked for built a wonderful tool for managing the servers called gamecreate: http://www.gamecreate.com/

There's no way I could have single handedly managed the 500+ game server instances with out something like that.

As an aside, if you've never had to deal with any of the CoD series servers count yourself very lucky. I think it was still a requirement for CoD3 that the windows dedicated server required directx installed..... just so it could show the splash screen.