Good afternoon people.

Could somebody recommend me a "good" alternative to either to Windows Server 2003 or 2008. I want to have if possible all functionality of the Windows server in an Linux Server distro.

Im out of my waters regarding Linux and i am having difficult time choosing a distro.

Under Server consideration i have the following:
Novel SUSE Enterprise Server 11
Red Hat Enterprise 5
CentOS 5.4
Mandriva Enterprise Server 5

All these preferably in a 64bit environment.

I would like the chosen distro to be stable, secure and its resources wont "fade" in time like windows.

All this will be setup in a ESX environment.
That will leave me room for any installation of a Windows Server concerning functionality Linux cannot provide... if necessary.

The use of the server will be..
DHCP Server
File Server
VPN Server
Mail Server (Exchange)
Application server (IIS)



The computers linked to the server will be:
2x Windows XP
1x MacBook
1x upnp device

If you need any more clarifications i am happy to provide them.

Keep in mind that i do not have any idea as to Linux but i am willing to learn so to get the benefits.

And maybe a distro that is not a killer to setup and maintain.

Thanx in advance guys!!

Dimitris

I can only recommend you Debian. I use it on my own server for many years and I can say, that it definitely won't fade in time. I set it up once and it was working for some years without any maintenance.

On the other side you can use any of the distributions you have listed. In my opinion you will be quite happy with all of them.

Hello and welcome to LinuxQuestions,

First of all, you will not be able to have completely the same funcionalities as a Windows 2003 or 2008 server. The first thing you'll have to do is forget the 'Windows way'. Linux is just a complete different ballgame.

I personally would add Debian to the list, since it's one of the most stable and secure distributions to my knowledge. I don't know how you plan to administer your servers but if you don't have any experience with Linux I would strongly advice you to start out learning the console and getting used to working in a terminal since that's the preferred way to administer a Linux server IMHO.

Setting Linux servers up in an ESX environment is no problem whatsoever.

You can have Linux run DHCP server, DNS server, OpenVPN, Samba fileserver (and printing), CUPS as print server, lots of possibilities.

However for the mailserver, if you want to hang on to Exchange, that's not going to work on Linux. If you want to mantain your Exchange then you'll need to have one Windows running. But there are pretty good opensource alternatives for Exchange that are worth you looking at them.

What exactly do you mean by application servers? ASP, .NET, other?????

Kind regards,

Eric

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