First Available Product in the Sun xVM Family of Virtualization and Management Solutions: Sun Microsystems today 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 Operating System-based x86 and SPARC 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. "Business requirements that demand tremendous growth are creating more datacenter complexity, as administrators need to manage increasing volumes of data, applications, and people on the network, as well as the rapid proliferation of servers and guest operating systems," said Steve Wilson, vice president, xVM, Sun Microsystems. "Through Sun xVM Ops Center's unique combination of asset discovery, inventory tracking, operating system provisioning, firmware updating and patch management capabilities, customers can automate a number of tasks on a global scale to improve their time to market and productivity to meet ever demanding service level agreements." Designed to scale for demanding HPC and globally distributed IT environments, Sun xVM Ops Center helps customers to automate their data centers and manage thousands of assets simultaneously. Through automated monitoring of assets on a network, and implementation of upgrades and patches for operating systems, Sun xVM Ops Center automates routine system administrator tasks in the data center. Sun xVM Ops Center addresses provisioning and update requirements to help improve predictability and keep Linux and Solaris instances current, thus improving the security and stability of systems. It gives the system administrator greater control to simulate updates and related dependencies before actually going forward with a change to enable more informed data center planning and minimize downtime. A distribution of Sun xVM Ops Center will be made available via free download. Commercial software subscriptions that include support and network delivered services are aggressively priced - starting at $100 (USD) per managed server and ranging up to $350 (USD), depending on customer selected feature set. A $10,000 (USD) Satellite Server subscription includes an on-site enterprise installation service and hands-on training. Building on Sun's commitment to open standards and customer choice, Sun will continue to innovate the Sun xVM platform and collaborate with open source communities. The first of Sun's contributions will be the Common Agent Container (CAC) code to the OpenxVM.org community under GPLv3. The CAC is the heart of the management infrastructure for many of Sun's products, including the Sun xVM Ops Center. In addition, Sun plans to make the entire code base used by the xVM Ops Center available to the OpenxVM.org community in the first quarter of 2008.