Jose,

Here are some questions I posed for a very knowledgeable Unix/Linux admin Kirk Waingrow of http://www.ugu.com/
http://www.ugu.com/sui/ugu/show?info.book

Let's say that you have a new Company of 5,000 and you don't want to run any Microsoft software at all. Is it possible and how would it be handled best?


1. Servers (Linux, Fedora, etc..)

Our file servers here are all running Fedora with 3ware raid controllers and are clustered for redundancy using “Heartbeat” and “DRBD” both freeware.
See the following:
DRBD Start
Linux-HA Project Web Site – home of heartbeat packages
Linux Magazine | November 2003 | FEATURES | Highly-Affordable High Availability - linux-ha + drbd how to – very good, written by the main heartbeat developer
Single System Image Clusters for Linux (SSI) – next gen cluster, not using this time around due to lack of proven drbd integration (critical) + lack of 2.6/xfs support (nice to have)
Enterprise Volume Management System
Fedora Project, sponsored by Red Hat
http://atrpms.net/dist/fc2/drbd/ - drbd 0.7.5
evms 2.3.3 (3 months old, not most recent, but has all needed features)
Heartbeat


2. Desktops, Redhat, Suse, etc..
You may want to take a look at Linspire, I believe they have a buy once use many.
The World's easiest desktop Linux
They also have an upgrade path and I believe remote deployment as well. Otherwise, sure take time and look at Redhat and Suse to see what provides the best deployment strategy.

3. I assume one of the Office suites is still available for free.
There are:
kOffice: KOffice is a free, integrated office suite for KDE
OpenOffice: OpenOffice.org is a free productivity suite compatible with all major office suites.

4. How do you manage/report on all the servers and desktops…. i.e.
(When a new patch for an application or the OS comes along how do you update 5,000 desktops and servers?)
Each flavor (RedHat/Suse/LinSpire) has their own way of doing it.

5. Can you run any type of centralized scripts against the client desktops?
Sure. As long as the remote access is provided, you can set scripts up to push or pull. You can use crontab to perform updates or manually do it.

6. Does Linux support some type of centralized directory similar to MS Active Directory that Linux desktops could belong to?
good old unix/YellowPages . Also check out PHP, LDAP.

7. How can you selectively prevent certain users or certain machines from running specific applications.
Permission control is available at the user and group levels.

8. If possible would achieving the above results require a very advanced Linux Admin (how many on staff) or within the realm of general system Admins.
You should have at least one Senior Level Admin (5-7yrs - $70-80k), 1-2 Intermediate level Admins (2-4yrs- $60-70k).

9. How do I build so many machines with linux fast?
SystemImager is the equivalent to Ghost: http://www.systemimager.org/

Resource book on migrating from Windows to Linux you may want to review

Windows to Linux Migration Toolkit

Hope this information is helpful Jose...