Sun Microsystems announced availability and pricing details for the Sun xVM Ops Center, a highly scalable datacenter automation tool for complete management of heterogeneous global IT environments. As part of the company's commitment to the open source community, Sun will also release the source code used to build Sun's xVM Ops Center to the OpenxVM.org community under the GNU General Public License version three (GPLv3).

Sun will provide ongoing code releases to OpenxVM.org, starting with the contribution of the Common Agent Container source code on Dec. 10, 2007. In addition, the first commercial release of Sun xVM Ops Center is expected to be available on Jan. 8, 2008.

A critical part of Sun's virtualization portfolio, Sun xVM Ops Center reduces datacenter management complexity by combining a range of lifecycle management functionality into an all-in-one tool. Sun xVM Ops Center helps simplify discovery, monitoring, operating system provisioning, comprehensive updates and patch management, firmware updates, and hardware management from power up to production in cross-platform Linux and Solaris(TM) Operating System-based x86 and SPARC(R) environments. As a result, Sun xVM Ops Center allows enterprises to streamline their data center operations, helping to lower costs and more easily manage rapid growth, data center consolidation and compliance requirements.

Click here to view on-demand Webcast of Red Hat Virtualization keynote

Last month, Brian Stevens, the Chief Technology Officer and Vice President of Engineering of Red Hat, delivered his Virtualization Keynote entitled "The Future of the Virtual Enterprise" at SYS-CON's  Virtualization Conference & Expo 2007 West in San Francisco.

"Virtualization is the hottest subject today," said Stevens, an industry luminary, who is credited with having pioneered new technologies that contributed to the rise of Linux as an industry-standard operating platform.