To be honest Fedora is a good test-drive of RHEL. The logos and look and feel are a little different, but under the hood they are pretty much the same. From a server perspective there's really not much of a difference, as a lot of the more noticeable changes in the newer Fedoras are desktop stuff. I'd recommend trying the Fedora 10 betas, however, as they should have the Exchange 2007 support in them.
Since you're looking to deploy on a large number of systems, I suggest you look into Kickstart. It's Red Hat's automated installation tool which may make your life a lot easier.
Jeffrey.
On Sun, Nov 2, 2008 at 1:19 AM, Haworth, Michael A. < Michael_Haworth@pas-technologies.com> wrote:
WOW!!!
I am pretty much overwhelmed at this point - I knew that I was flirting with a completely new world, I just didn't know how big the world was. There have been a LOT of answers, suggestions and recommendations and I am still working to sort through the emails. I have just gotten done downloading Fedora (still looking for a trial copy of Redhat on their site) and will probably install it on this laptop tomorrow (HP nc6910 currently running Ubuntu 8.10). I am also trying to ensure that I have it on my calendar to be at the next meeting so that I can talk with some of you if you are available, there are multiple changes being considered on our network and (of course) most of them hinge on keeping or eliminating Windows as the Corporate OS. I am not the sole person behind this potential change, I am just the one who was foolish (?) enough to say "umm, yah - I have messed with Linux for a bit, I could probably work on figuring that out...".