Best OS for an old PE2550?

[Brian Hughes]

New guy here,

I'm a broadcast engineer at Napa Valley College; supporting the  
broadcast engineering program.  We've just received a few PowerEdge  
2550s, dual Pentium III 1GHz 1GB with PERC 3/Di controller.  We get a  
lot of donations, some useful, some not so much.  We also received  
about 1.5 TB of fibre channel storage in the form of many SGI  
PowerVault (Clariion FC5400) units, just wish I knew what to do with  
them.

But about the PE2550s, we'd like to use one of these for a light-duty  
webserver, the other for a training test-bed for networking and such  
for students.  We'd like to run the usual for the webserver, PHP,  
Apache, MySQL, etc.

My question is what is the best and latest OS that will run on these  
units?

 From looking at the docs at Dell and searching through these lists  
an older version of Red Hat Linux would be good but I'm not sure how  
new.  Should I consider the Enterprise server versions or stick with  
the older RH Linux 9?

It looks like Windows Server 2003 would work, that would make the  
campus IT guys happy, obvious blasphemy on a linux list and I'd  
prefer a *nix variant anyway.  I've seen mention of Fedora, SuSE, etc  
but it looks like there are more issues and/or workarounds required,  
is that right?

Do I need to run/use OMSA?  From an earlier post it looks like I'd  
need version 4.5 or earlier, will 4.5 work?  Anything else I should  
know or read up on to make these useful to a cash-starved college  
program?

Now about those fibre channel raids, any chance, with the right HBA,  
that the PE2550s will be able to manage and use them?

Thanks,
Brian Hughes
Broadcast Systems Engineer
Napa Valley College