Ballmer: We want to help you manage all of your IT

LAS VEGAS - Microsoft wants to help enterprises manage their entire IT environments, not just Windows systems, Chief Executive Officer (CEO) Steve Ballmer told attendees at the Microsoft Management Summit in Las Vegas on Wednesday.

To underscore the point of heterogeneity, Ballmer shared the stage with a large Sun Microsystems Ierver and during a demonstration showed how Microsoft Operations Manager (MOM), one of Microsoft's systems management products, could be used to monitor servers running Red Hat's Enterprise Linux and Sun's Solaris.

In the demonstration, Bill Anderson, a senior product manager at Microsoft, used MOM to remotely turn off one server running Solaris and start up a backup server. The demonstration used WS-Management, a Web services specification developed by Microsoft, Sun and others.

"We have worked closely with Sun, yes Sun, the people we never used to work closely with," Ballmer said. "That kind of heterogeneous interoperability not only are we committed to, but the work we are doing with Sun is very instrumental to it."

Microsoft and Sun last year signed a 10-year settlement and collaboration agreement. Ballmer said he and Sun CEO Scott McNealy will give an update on that pact soon.

"Scott and I are going to do sort of a state of the union report [on] where we have gotten in a few weeks," Ballmer said. The companies have been criticized that their effort, which they had said was about interoperability, has not resulted in many tangible results for users.

Beating the interoperability drum, Ballmer also said that Virtual Server 2005 with the release of Service Pack 1 later this year will officially support more guest operating systems (OSes), including Linux.

Virtual Server lets users run different OSes on a single hardware server. It can host a range of x86-based OSes, including Linux, but there has not been official Linux support.

Additionally, Microsoft plans to build virtualization into Windows Server. The addition, based on Windows hypervisor technology, will come in the Longhorn "wave" of products, said Bob Kelly, a general manager in the Windows Server Group.

Kelly would not say whether the virtualization features will be in the first Longhorn server release, due in 2007, or be added later. The virtualization technology will support hardware technologies from Intel Corp. and Advanced Micro Devices Inc.

Also related to virtualization, Microsoft said it will offer a royalty-free license for its Virtual Hard Disk format for partners to build on top of the format. For users of MOM, Microsoft recently shipped an addition so they can manage virtual servers from the operations management application.

In his presentation, Ballmer said that while Microsoft "grew up on the desktop," it has matured into a provider of enterprise class products. "It was just 16 years ago that we started work on Windows NT, 16 years ago we began a journey to be very serious about enterprise computing," he said.

And in enterprise management, Microsoft has made its big steps in the last five years with products including MOM and Systems Management Server (SMS) and its Dynamic Systems Strategy (DSI), a 10-year project to create a self-managing IT environment.

"Really, the last five years is where I think we made the big advances in enterprise management," Ballmer said.