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As a sysadmin in academia, this is not so straightforward. Since number of servers/VMs are in ballpark of over one hundred, RedHat license costs will be over 30,000$/year. This is not insignificant amount of money and not easy to get the money suddenly.

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$30k is a significant amount, especially in academic environment, I don't deny it. But it's not much for > 100 servers. In my previous job, I had licenses which were about 15k€ for one server (thanks Oracle...) and the Windows Server licenses were also pretty expensive. $300-500 per server/year is not much more than a Photoshop license for one designer. And if we talk big business (1000's of servers and even more), you will get very special pricing anyway.

Not just price, but ability to function without constant access to the satellite portal. It's darn near impossible to upgrade a RHEL box from a work at home VPN environment.

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