SLES10 hands down

In my mind SuSE wins hands down. OpenSuSE and SLES10 are the best enterprise Linux distributions our there and I don't even think about RHEL in production.

Why? No other distribution hits this sweet spot of utility properly:

1. make cloneconfig - beautiful, make a kernel config exactly like your running config without any worries
   
2. yast2 +/- gui - easy to learn sysadmin tasks... low training and pain threshold
   
3. autoYast - easy to clone installs
   
4. LDAP / ActiveDirectory integration - integrate and play nice with Windows domains so easy a newbie could do it!
   
5. centralized patching - keep your systems patched from one patch repository
   
6. "plays nice with VMware"
7. profile.local - put your localized custom configurations in *.local files along side the distribution files... end the Gentoo configuration file merge nightmare by keeping your localized configuration files separate.

Linux is Linux, you can do all these things on any distribution you just have to figure out how. With SuSE you don't have to figure any of this practical system administration stuff out.