Indy and I did some good work together. I still remember that time he called me up asking me for help with a Microsoft Exchange migration that was going bad for him at 11:30pm my time. I think I got to bed around 4am. Good times.
Anyway, we also disagreed a great deal and all of that disagreement centered around Microsoft versus Open Source - mostly CentOS (pick your preferred distro but I'll use CentOS as my example here).
If you can support CentOS and want to you use, it's your network so go for it. But there are two major problems I have with Open Source software such as CentOS.
First is using CentOS to virtualize Windows. In my opinion, doing this gains you nothing. Regardless of your hypervisor, you still have to pay for the Windows license. For example, if you use CentOS to host 4 copies of Windows Server on a single physical machine, you still need to have TWO copies of Windows Server 2016/2019 Standard to properly license that server. The only thing CentOS has done for you is add one more thing to support and now you have to find a way to back up those virtual machines that works with CentOS. Using Windows as the hypervisor keeps everything fully supported by MS and you can find far more people available that can help you as I can promise there aren't that many IT people in your area that know CentOS. All of them know Windows.
Secondly, and I touched on this in the first point, a lot of IT people who do know CentOS don't install it as a way to help the customer, they install CentOS because they know most other IT firms in the area can't support it. In other words, it's a form of lock in. And I think that's unfair to the customer.
JamesNT
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