Microsoft is making System Center, its central management scheme, natively manage Linux, Unix and VMware virtual servers.

The widgetry has always been a Windows-only affair, but now there are betas available showing off Microsoft’s cross-platform prowess, important to Microsoft’s place in the data center.

Microsoft has released a public beta of so-called Cross-Platform Extensions to its System Center Operations Manager 2007, which for the first time can manage HP-UX, Red Hat, Solaris and SUSE out-of-the-box.

The facility comes complements of WS-Management and OpenPegasus, the open source implementation of the Distributed Management Task Force’s Common Information Model (CIM) and Web-Based Enterprise Management (WBEM) standards.

Partners like Novell are supposed to come in with their “deep domain expertise” and optimize the widgetry with management packs for applications like MySQL and Apache.

And in another turnabout, Microsoft said it would join the OpenPegasus Steering Committee and contribute royalty-free code to the open source community under its OSI-approved Microsoft Public License.

OpenPegasus is run by the Open Group and is meant to unify the management of distributed computing infrastructures.

Meanwhile, Microsoft has delivered up a public beta of System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 (formerly code named Virtual Machine Manager vNext) that manages virtualized infrastructures regardless of whether they’re running on Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V, Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 R2 or rival VMware ESX Server.

Microsoft says System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 tightly integrates with Operations Manager 2007 to deliver a new feature called Performance and Resource Optimization (PRO).

Operations Manager, which can now integrate with third-party management suites like Tivoli and HP OpenView, generates “PRO tips” that can be used to optimize data centers based on pre-defined policies and real-time demand.

Used with System Center, Virtual Machine Manager 2008 can manage both virtualized and physical servers and applications across desktops and data centers with a single set of tools.

Brocade, Dell, EMC, Emulex, HP, QLogic and Quest are supposed to deliver management packs for PRO.

The betas are at http://connect.microsoft.com.