mjhjmtu

I'm looking to run an enterprise setup at home for the purpose of learning. I'm somewhat familiar with Windows enterprise systems as that's what we use at work. But I realize that I'm at the beginning of my IT career and Linux is the choice of many larger companies. I think it's smart to become familiar with the Linux side of enterprise and I figured setting up a small setup at home with my computers made sense.

I need it to be free, there's just no room in the budget for this (so that rules out REHL I believe). So it's a toss up between CentOS, Debian, and maybe something I'm missing. What's my best bet?

Getting familiar with Debian, REHL and CentOS are a good starting point. You'd want to get familiar with multiple Linux distros not just one.

You will want to get familiar with many Linux technologies as well such as LXC, cgroups, systemd, VFS, etc.

In addition you will want to learn common software technologies like databases such as PostgreSQL, Mariadb, web servers such as Apache and nginx as well as iptables for firewall as well as directory servers like openldap.

There are also various IT automation including deployment solutions and logging that are used there are a lot of these. You might as well get use to a few and then learn new ones on the go. One i use a lot is Red Hat's Ansible.

Generally speaking enterprise or any large business will use management software or "platforms" like OpenStack, libvirt and you'd want to get familiar with those systems as well.

Basically you shouldn't just be learning one thing. You want to get the general idea but once you get hired you might need to learn something new and thats okay any decent employer should help you with that anyway.