Many IT experts will check the date to make sure it is not the first of April when they hear that Microsoft is to support Linux servers in a beta update to its System Center Operations Manager suite for datacentre management. Microsoft’s antipathy to everything open source, and Linux in particular, has always seemed an intractable chasm, just one of those things to get used to in life.

So what has changed? Has the software giant had a sudden reconciliation with its Linux vendor rivals? This does not seem to be the case. Instead, commercial reality has forced the company’s hand.

While Windows may dominate the corporate desktop, the situation is very different in the datacentre, where Linux has proved ideal for operating a web presence, and well-established architectures such as HP-UX live alongside more recent Windows-based server deployments.

Managing such diverse environments is no picnic, and IT departments have tired of having to use different tools for every vendor or platform represented in their datacentre. Like it or not, Microsoft has realised it needs to support server platforms such as Red Hat alongside Windows, or it risks losing customers to more open management tools.

That said, Microsoft should still be applauded for giving customers what they want, and tying Virtual Machine Manager into the stack is an astute move that will let administrators get a single point of control over the entire IT infrastructure, assuming it lives up to its promise.