Saving money with NethServer

Continuing the discussion from Community Subscription Feedback:

I love that one. Who wanna add some experience? How much do you save avoiding Microsoft licenses or similar?

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Example Firewall/Gateway/Proxy/IPS:

300 € / year Fortinet firewall subscription with signature/IPS updates

Example M$ AD/Mail Infrastructure:

600 € Windows Server 2016 (Directory service, file/printer sharing)
You may want two because two Active Directory domain controllers can replicate, so your users can login when one DC is down.

30 € / Device/User that uses the Windows Server

580 € Exchange Server 2016 (Mail server)
You may use a backup Exchange server and/or external backup software.

40 € / Device/User that uses the Exchange Mail Server

10 users, 1 Firewall, 2 DCs, 1 Exchange (just license prices for servers and using them, NO client software like OS and office included):

Price: 300 € / year + 2180 € / infrastructure migration without having extra backup software, PBX, groupware, CRM…

If you use M$ Project or Remote Desktop Host Services you have the same server/CAL(client access license) licensing.
And there are virtualization licenses and so on… You need new licenses with new servers.

I know it’s about saving money, but just to see what you get:
The “roles and features” of Windows Server 2016:

“roles”:

“features”:



So my conclusio: You save money by basically using Nethserver and additionally with every service you use.

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Agreed. And you didn’t mention stability yet :wink:

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I don’ t have a NethServer saving as example but it very well could be a NethServer implementation.
A friend of mine is sysadmin at a secondary school. This is a reasonably large school with about 3k students. For the school the were looking for a new landline telephone solution. They asked several providers and companies what it would cost to implement a VoIP solution for around 80 telephones.
The cheapest came with a quote of just under EUR200k,- for the VoIP central and 80 IP Phones.
Yes you read it right: two hundred thousend Euro
He is an opensource enthousiast and he thought, there must be a way to cut the price.
After some investigation and a lot of reading how to set up an Asterisk server, he wrote a plan for the board of the school. He played it ‘safe’ and decided to invest in a fairly large dedicated server of EUR6000,-
On that server he installed FreePBX on it. For another 10k he bought 80 VoIP phones which could directly be plugged into their VLAN capable switch they already had.
Sure he had to spend quite some time, but a savings of almost EUR180.000,- is IMO a great example why opensource can be a gamechanger in small but also in large environments.
Since NethServer can serve Asterisk too this very well COULD have been a NethServer story…

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Can you provide some docs/details from this interesting setup. I used FreePBX with trixbox and PIAF some time ago. I also tested NethServer FreePBX.

I’d like to provide a Nethserver FreePBX doc/howto, so this could be a NethServer story in the future, what do you think about it?

Here’s some starting point, extension and voicemail setup:

I just sent my friend a message if he has some documentation on his implementation… I’ll keep you posted

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Writing a scenario like this would be amazing! I’d like to see many examples like that. I’m sure that we have many amazing stories around, we have just to find them!

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