Replacing Win Servers with Redhat / Centos

[Moif_Murphy]

Hi,

I've recently rejoined the company after being away working as a consultant somewhere else. This other company I was working for had a majority Novell / SuSE layout with Zenworks, Groupwise and eDirectory. It was great, I've always tinkered with nix and have had a dual boot of various flavours on my home PC but have never seen it in use in the enterprise.

So anyway, I've come back to this relatively small company and I'm seeing us plow all this money into MS Licenses and not really getting a return for the costs.

It's a simple setup: 3 Win2k servers. The first is primarily IIS, the second is MSSQL and the third is our file server. We have an AD domain and that's about it. Our email is hosted off site on an Exchange hosted server platform.

My question is, if I were to try and convince my boss that OS is the way to go to save some money (we can't afford to pay one of our suppliers at the moment) how would I do it? I've installed VMWare Server on one of the servers here and have CentOS running and I'm thinking of demonstrating a mail server initially. The only thing is that it has to be compatible with Outlook 2003, easy to administer and robust to handle the accounts of 300+ people.

I'm also considering an alternative to AD but only having exposure to eDirectory I need some suggestions on where to look. Again, ease of use is paramount.

Thanks for any advice.

[ennoil]

I have known people to replace Win servers with Linux ones (Including PDC's) that have gone un-noticed for month on end. Try setting up a server with SAMBA and use that as your file server for a while and see if anyone notices. after a couple of months go to the boss and say that server X has run on Linux for 2 months with no issues, why not try moving other servers to Linux as well.
How hard it will be to move the Web and SQL server to Apache and MySQL depend on how much ASP is involved and whether or not your web guys are willing to learn PHP. Also there are differences between the 2 databases that your DB guys will have to learn.
It will require some up front costs but in the long run it will be worth it.

[Moif_Murphy]

I have known people to replace Win servers with Linux ones (Including PDC's) that have gone un-noticed for month on end. Try setting up a server with SAMBA and use that as your file server for a while and see if anyone notices. after a couple of months go to the boss and say that server X has run on Linux for 2 months with no issues, why not try moving other servers to Linux as well.
How hard it will be to move the Web and SQL server to Apache and MySQL depend on how much ASP is involved and whether or not your web guys are willing to learn PHP. Also there are differences between the 2 databases that your DB guys will have to learn.
It will require some up front costs but in the long run it will be worth it.

Hey thanks.

Thing is my boss is pretty hands on and uses the servers quite alot via Terminal Services so he'd know straight away if I swapped something out. My idea is to use VMWare Server as a proof-of-concept lab and show him that there are viable alternatives to MS software.

[ennoil]

VMWare should be a good way to go. I would start with the file server and SAMBA though.
If you are new to Linux and SAMBA then you may want to look at OpenSuSE. The YaST utility will help you set up an SMB (Samba) share pretty easily. You can also use it to set up other things like DHCP/DNS/Apache with out much difficulty. (The best way to set up and learn it is to do it with the configuration files though.)