What do you do if you're Microsoft and want to show that your management software plays nicely with hardware from a variety of vendors?

Microsoft chief executive Steve Ballmer at the Microsoft Management Summit in Las Vegas decided to take apart a Sun server. And he wasn't even trashing the leading vendor of Unix systems.

Sun and Microsoft after all patched up about one year ago, with Microsoft paying Sun about $2 billion as a "shut up" fee. ("2 billion dollars buys you a lot of love," Sun's Jonathan Schwartz said about the deal).

But the new-found love didn't mean that Ballmer wasn't truly enjoying himself when he pull the fans out of a Sun server to demonstrate the Microsoft software - through webservices - could diagnose the problem.