CentOS: Best Suited for Businesses?

One of my clients is looking to standardize a distribution for (I’m guessing) around 50 servers, and I’ve been tasked with formulating compelling reasons for them to do so. I’m strongly leaning towards CentOS, and here are my reasons:

• Binary compatible (at least, in theory) with RHEL.
• Quite stable (the only time I get burned is when I run something like “yum update –enable CentOSplus (whatever)” on a CentOS 4 box)
• Yum packaging is now mature, and a company can easily make their own internal repository to cut down on update times.
• Updates for CentOS until 2010; til 2012 for CentOS 4; and (I believe) until 2014 for CentOS 5.
• Sensible file structures.
• Well put together packages that rarely step on each other (at least, in my experience).
• Solid enterprise support on enterprise level equipment (I assume because of the RHEL connection).
• Fairly good documentation.
• Certification paths (even though it’s through RHEL, it’s still very applicable).
• Different repositories for different purposes (e.g. RPMforge)
• In a way, it seems to be a “stable” version of RHEL.

Areas I see CentOS lacking in (but I don’t think really matter as much to lots of enterprises) include:

• Fewer packages (as opposed to, say, Debian or Gentoo).
• Yum not having as many “cool” options as other package management systems (e.g. Debian’s apt-get or Gentoo’s emerge)
• No minimal net install CD (like Debian’s netinstall.iso). The closet thing I have to that in CentOS is 4.x’s Single Server CD or popping in the first CentOS 5 cd and disabling everything (which is easy to miss if you simply take the CentOS 5 install defaults).
• Upgrading can be weird (What is the CentOS equivalent to Debian’s “apt-get dist-upgrade”?). I’ve experienced all sorts of hairiness when I upgrade PHP4 to PHP5 on CentOS, which I’m not sure is a result of PHP, CentOS, or my way of doing things…

On my personal time, I love challenges — funky triple boots “just because”, goofing around with xconf settings, lean and mean Gentoo installs on crappy hardware, or maybe sorting out problems that unstable packages bring. But when doing business, I want as few surprises as humanly possible.