Ok so the company I work for is currently running an RHEL4 environment. RHEL 4 runs just about all of our servers (with a few win2k3 servers mixed in), and our users run RHEL 4 in a thin client environment.

The IT Director is considering changing distributions when our Redhat support agreement expires at the end of the summer. Right now he'd like me to put together a comparison chart between RHEL4, RHEL5, and SLES10.

I would personally also like to consider Ubuntu/Ubuntu LTS but I don't think he feels Ubuntu is on par with the other two enterprise level distros.

What do you all think about this? Is it a little premature to deploy Ubuntu in a 100 user office environment? I see that canonical ltd does offer commercial support agreements that are comparable to Redhat and SuSE. Is Ubuntu adoption going to be a growing trend or do you think businesses will stick with either Redhat or SuSE?

RHEL and Suse are the two enterprise distros that have wide acceptance not just by corporations using them but by companies that produce commercial DBs and Apps like Oracle.

Oracle also recently release their so called "unbreakable linux".

If it were me and I already had RHEL I'd stick with it unless I found the cost of switching was a signficant saving (e.g. more than 20%) because you'll have to reload your systems with Suse rather than just upgrade AND you'll have to learn the Suse way of managing things which is different than RHEL so you'll have other hidden costs in switching. (Bias alert: I'm a fan of RHEL/Fedora Core anyway.)

There are a lot of Linux folks that would steer you away from any Novell product any way because of the perceived sell out to M$ in the recent agreement those two companies signed about patent infringements. Of course earlier folks would have steered you away from RHEL because of its perceived betrayal of open source when it separated the "RedHat" name from "Fedora" name taking the former to be commercial only.

Ubuntu seems to have a lot of fans out in the Linux world. I haven't used it but having used Debian on which it is based I'm not keen on it simply because it uses apt rather than rpm/yum/up2date.

The thing is you can probably buy support for Ubuntu from somewhere - the question is how good that support will be. Suse and RHEL have business models built on commercial distributions whereas Ubuntu to me is more of an up and comer that isn't quite ready.

Since it is all Linux you can probably get things to work - the question is how much of it do you need to rely on 3rd party support for?

All very good points. I personally would rather stick with RH because I run CentOS at home and it's the environment I'm most familiar with. Plus RHEL5 has some very promising features. I think the main reason for looking for an alternative is to cut costs.

For the advanced platform Redhat charges $1,499 per year for its standard support subscription. SuSE on the other hand charges $1,998.00 for THREE years of standard support. That would save us ~$2,500 per server over the next three years which is pretty substantial.

Canonical charges $750 per year for standard support, which would save us $2,250 per server over the next three years.

I think Ubuntu would offer a desktop experience very similar to RHEL4, while SuSE has put a lot of time into customizing the Gnome GDM. Sure it's pretty, but it would definitely have a much steaper learning curve for users coming from RHEL 4's gnome desktop environment.

Thanks for the feedback, putting this comparison together should actually be a pretty fun project.

It might be a good idea to talk to your sales rep and let him know you're strongly looking at moving to Suse for costs. You'd be amazed at how knowing they have competition helps you to get deals.

I remember I worked in a place where we exclusively used EMC Symmetrix disk arrays. We bought a Hiachi Data Systems (HDS) array to see if it would work as well because it was significantly cheaper. Suddenly EMC was able to give us an additional 25% discount on our next bid. This was after one of their CEs had seen we had an HDS in the data center.

Also it might be worthwhile to have a mix anyway. In prior job searches I've found knowing multiple OSes was a big plus.