Sun announced that it will ship a hypervisor, xVM, and a management product, xVM Ops Center, aimed specifically at heterogeneous virtualized infrastructure. xVM combines a stripped-down version of Solaris with the Xen open-source hypervisor to provide a somewhat light-weight virtualization infrastructure that can use core Sun/Solaris technologies for storage virtualization and for avoiding hardware-based service interruptions.

xVM will run on Intel or AMD x64/x86 chips, on SPARC, and will host Windows, Linux and Solaris guests. Sun, by emphasizing heterogeneous platform support via a thin hypervisor, hopes to capitalize on growing enterprise demand for virtual infrastructure that provides easy management, but does not require server or OS monoculture.

Sun's embrace of Xen expands the market and ecosystem for that hypervisor platform, but also places Sun in more direct competition with partners VMware and its ESX hypervisor, and Microsoft and its forthcoming Viridian hypervisor. Moreover, Sun's xVM will, like Xen itself, be released as open source, offering free products that compete directly with partner and Xen patron Citrix's XenSource as layered functionality atop Xen.

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