How does the hardware requirements for Caldera, SuSE, and Red Hat compare with windows servers 2003?

Answer 1

Roughly the same; it depends on what you intend to use the server for.

That is, if you are going to be building a system that is just serving up files, you'll want good and fast disk access and throughputs regardless of the operating system. If your servers are going to be doing a lot of processing of data, you will want to have some beefy processors, and probably several of them. In most cases, you'll want to have a good bit of RAM to handle the multiple requests servers tend to get. In other words, it matters less what operating system you're going to use and more what you're going to DO with your server in picking out your server hardware.

Now, that said, the one exception to that rule is in hardware support; not all manufacturers have Linux drivers, for instance. (I'm wrestling with a PC that has a Broadcom wireless chipset with Fedora, but it requires a proprietary firmware and so I have been presented with some odd issues there). If you intend to use Linux of any flavor, make sure the hardware has support under Linux.

To get to the heart of your question a bit more, just as you need to look at what your server will do to determine the hardware requirements, you need to look at what you want it to do in order to determine the o/s requirements. Do you want an Active Directory domain controller? Win2003 is the hands down winner. (Obviously.) Want to do something else? Figure out which O/S does it best, go from there. :)

Hope this helps!