If you needed .NET in a production environment I'm perplexed as to why running it on RHEL would be a good decision. The POC is excellent but I wouldn't be serving .NET apps to my clients using this.
We have six production nodes sitting behind a load balancer at three sites. That's 18 total nodes, all of which we're paying to run on Windows Server.
If we could run these 18 nodes on Linux, even with the associated support contract, we could see significant savings. All of this is a drop in the ocean compared to our database costs (we're using a massive Oracle database) but the savings could be enough for an extra employee.
You can argue the pros/cons of .Net in general, but we find it allows us fairly good productivity. We've also moved a lot of front-end logic into HTML/JS/CSS so if we ever moved platforms we aren't as tied, but right now MVC/EF is working fine.
This a million times over. We have a very similar environment except you can add in a mainframe and a few MS SQL Servers in addition to the ridiculously expensive Oracle stuff. However, the cost of moving VERY productive .Net staff to something else would be even more expensive. So for now, we just wait and see (while running a .net framework version 2 years out of compliance).
Maybe not now, but this is a move for the future so that .Net can survive in a world dominated by Linux. The second it's actually possible to ditch Windows and run my apps on Linux in production Windows will be banished from my datacenter. .Net is awesome, Windows sucks, I want .Net on Linux.
I'm keeping it on my radar due to cost differences in AWS. A .net web app using 4 EC2 m3.xlarge instances (2 front ends per AZ) would save over $6000 per year in hosting if using Linux AMI versus Windows.
Yes, the Windows tax is not cheap, nor are they nearly as easy to clone and manage in a virtual environment. Linux is simply a superior server in virtually every conceivable way but most especially financially.
