Hi, Anders already answered most of the questions, I just have one or two things to add.
am looking at SUSE for the server now. I know SUSE can do everything Red Hat could, as far as the server goes. Stock standard out of the box I would dare say SUSE can do more. It's good for desktop too :-)
I am thinking of taking the plunge and switching all workstations to SUSE, or some flavour of Linux, for the purpose of getting away from all the Windows OS grief, security holes, virus vulnerabilities, etc.
I wouldn't do it all at once, especially if you have windows stuff to run. OfficeXP can be runn through Crossover Office (www.codeweavers.com) and I know some versions of Visual Basic do too, not sure about the most recent versions though. What I would do is put SUSE on the server and get that sorted out. SUSE 9.0 Professional would be all you need. Then put SUSE 9.0 Pro on one of the desktops and experiment. Once you get everything going the way you want it, it would be easy to copy the relevant configs to all the machines (or even clone the drives, if the machines are identical.
Has anyone done something like this? If so, how did it go? Did it make life that much easier? Wish I could do it at some of our clients... :-)
Finally, from the SUSE website I see that SUSE Professional can run server software. We have a server at one of our clients that runs a samba domain controller, file server, mail with postfix, courier, spamassassin, web server, BitDefender antivirus, and some other minor things from time to time, on SuSE 8.0 Pro. It's been up since SuSE 8.0 came out has survived power outages almost daily since then. It's still running as reliably as day one.
Just my personal opinion, SUSE Pro is a lot more robust and stable than Red Hat for the servers I've had to maintain. Various people's mileage may vary, of course. Hope this helps -- Kind regards Hans du Plooy Newington Consulting Services hansdp at newingtoncs dot co dot za