If it potentially could save licensing costs of about one sysadmin it is worth looking at. It is unlikely (but possible) an entire additional sysadmin will need to be employed just to support Samba.
Agreed. We currently have to keep a Windows admin on staff (who actually costs a lot more than the CALs) just to manage our shares, Exchange, and file servers. It'd be nice to get these final pieces of the Windows puzzle out of our environment and staff solely Linux admins.
But I do agree with the dbrain's sentiment. If it was going to have a significantly higher TCO, I wouldn't do it.
There's definitely a benefit for having those "one off" admins around. I'm the one Linux guy surrounded by 4 Windows admins. The services I'm responsible for can easily be pushed on to Windows servers... but I'm kept around for the off chance that some software will only run on Redhat or Citrix or whatever. But I'm also useful in how I approach tasks. My coworkers are quick to search Google for an answer, download a tool and have it do the dirty work. I'd rather look at the documentation, source code or API, raw log files, or even write my own tool to do whatever's necessary. Neither philosophies are wrong. But some are definitely better.
All that being said, I'm also underpaid (80% regional average). Maybe that's the real reason they keep me around.
