Costly? Bug-ridden? Gigantic?
Most enterprise customers are on an enterprise agreement with Microsoft, and having been the lead on most of our licensing efforts with MS over the last 5 years, I can tell you that their pricing is very fair, and they don’t charge for test/development environment distributions which is a lot different from RHEL.
Bug-ridden? Please cite to what OS you’re referring. Server 2012 R2 is absolutely nothing like the steaming pile that was NT4.0 or even 2003. I’ve never worked in a more stable, intuitive OS.
Gigantic? Server 2012 R2 Core runs on <10 GB of local disk. Server 2016 Nano will require <1 GB of local disk. Not sure of your definition of gigantic. RHEL 6 needs at least 8 GB of local disk just for a stripped-down install, and there’s no GUI.
More MS FUD coming from the uninformed. I love it. You all make my job easy.
<10 GB or space, said with a straight face!
Your job is easy when dealing with the uninformed, not the informed. Ignorant upper management is the only reason corporations use Microbloat.
That's odd. I could swear I'm paying for an MSDN "test engineer" account just so I can download and install MS server ware without having to jump through extra hoops for activation and stay legal for licensing (that's what my corporate counsel told me I had to do, no eval versions allowed).
Frankly my Linux strategy for SQL Server 2016 is Postgres. The trick is not to need any serious disk i/o performance, hahah.