My interest in the Linux platform was sparked around 18 months ago when previous employment had me take ownership of the cPanel web hosting platform, which obviously runs on Linux. This came about due to my personal experience with Wordpress sites and in particular, migrating them from one hosting provider to another.
At the time I was part of a 'Wintel' server support team looking after a massive exchange environment, a fairly big AD with a multi-domain forest, plenty of trust relationships, IIS servers, ISA servers etc.... So I was still very much a Windows man even though I had already been trying to specialise in VMware ESX and Citrix in previous roles... Windows was still what I’d call 'Home'.
Anyway, I took on the cPanel platform and before long needed to go beyond the excellent web based GUI.
"Ah... This isn't a Windows command prompt?!?!"
So out comes VMware workstation to the rescue, on goes CentOS 6.2 and the fun begins. This is where I first experienced Linux in a professional capacity and over the next 18 months, with the excellent guidance of a Unix consultant who I worked with (on the end of the phone and with Lync for many, many hours), I started my journey into the Linux world.
Fast forward to the present and I have since run a number of LAMP web servers and experimented with Linux to run applications bespoke to the industry I currently apply my knowledge in. This experience also opened my mind to various open source platforms such as pfSense, OpenStack, Cloudstack and the KVM hypervisor... Funnily enough, I am putting a failover pfSense CARP set up in the datacentre production environment tomorrow.
Thats how much I have come to trust and adopt 'Open Source' technology, especially the community that surrounds it.
In at the deep end... Bye bye Windows! and I have to say considering this is my laptop I use for work, I am very impressed and am not regretting a thing nor am I finding myself needing to spin up a Windows VM. Result!
Also, the UI... And it needs to be said, the stupid Metro touch crap in Windows 8 has done this for me.... I don't want my laptop to look like a phone and I definitely don't want to use it like one!...
This is my nice, slick, fast and tidy Xubuntu 13.10 desktop:
It does everything I need, I can manage my Production ESXi environments, get on all the DRAC's of servers, connect to exchange with thunderbird, open office documents, connect to my VPN gateways.... Even RDP works fine! So does teamviewer... Promox VE displays perfectly and I have Oracle Virtualbox for local virtualisation.
That was the biggest point for me... Being able to manage Windows environments from Linux... and so far I have to say.... 10 out of 10 from me!
So after 14 years of using Windows, I have made the move away from it on my only computer that I use for everything. I suppose this is the best way to learn...
Until Next time!
Tom
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