Microsoft will make it easier for businesses to use its management tools for a wide variety of hardware, up to and including Linux systems, chief executive Steve Ballmer told delegates at the company's Management Summit in Las Vegas.

In his keynote, broadcast over the internet, Ballmer also showed off Microsoft's Virtual Server running Red Hat Linux.

"Much as that hurts my eyes, I know that's an important capability for our Virtual Server customers," he said in a reference to the open source operating system.

The virtualisation product can be used to consolidate several servers running different operating systems on a single piece of hardware. But Ballmer admitted that the company has "a list as long as my arm" of features that need to be added before it is finished.

Ballmer also announced that Microsoft will embrace the network access standards set by the Trusted Computing Group in the upcoming server version of Longhorn. The Group aims to improve the level of software security by creating industry standards.

Longhorn Server will arrive about six months after Longhorn reaches the desktop, Ballmer said. Microsoft has stated previously that it wants to have its latest operating system available for desktop users by December 2006.

Ballmer also touted the partnership between Microsoft and Sun Microsystems signed last year, under which the two companies started increasing the interoperability between their systems and solutions.

In a demo he showed how Microsoft Operations Manager is now able to manage Sun servers running Solaris. Ballmer pulled out the fans from the system, and the software warned about the overheating and allowed the administrator to move the workload to another unit.

"We've worked very closely with Sun. Yes, the Sun that we never worked closely with before," said Ballmer.

Microsoft's management software contains applications for system management sold under the System Center brand. The offering competes with Computer Associates' Unicenter, IBM's Tivoli and HP's OpenView.