Microsoft announced that System Center will support the Linux distributions from RedHat and Suse. The solution is based on Web Services for Management (WS-Management) and OpenPegasus, where Microsoft will join the Steering comitee, and contribute code under the Microsoft Public License (OSI approved)

Microsoft's Virtual Machine Additions for Linux are "designed to improve the usability and interoperability of running qualified Linux operating systems as guests or virtual machines of Virtual Server 2005 R2 SP1". It improves guest and host synchronisation ( time synchronisation, heartbeat generation, and coordinated shutdown), mouse and display drivers, as well as the SCSI hard drive emulation. Several versions of Suse but also RedHat distributions are supported, in standard and enterprise versions.

Source: VMBlog

Dell computers with Ubuntu pre-installed are now also available in Europe (UK,France and Germany). You can expect a default Ubuntu installed, with device drivers installed, but no proprietary codecs. Dell also has agreements with Novell and Redhat. They also built a JBOSS based solution with Redhat.