When people start mentioning price for these sorts of things I get a little confused, volume licensing for a bunch of hyper-v servers running 20-30 windows guests is actually quite cheap (you only have to pay for each licensed host server) I also have seen mention of a per user cost for ad? not sure where you got that from... I think exchange goes for about 6 bucks a user or so.. the next office setup ill be looking at will be three beefy hyper-v servers and running most applications on windows core... windows is now getting to the point where the only time I need to do any work is for weekly windows updates.