This being the week that virtualization graduated to being an everybody's-gotta-have-one checkbox item, Sun rolled up to Oracle OpenWorld festivities, where Oracle had just unveiled the Xen-based Oracle VM, with its own free young open source Xen-based xVM program for Solaris confident that in the next few years every self-respecting data center in the world will be virtualized.

Sun had in tow a supporting cast consisting of Red Hat, MySQL, Quest Software, Symantec and of course AMD and Intel to lend their huzzahs to the announcement of the unfinished widgetry.

Sun claims it's not too late with its virtualization bid because VMware, the leader, only has 9% of the market.

Sun's xVM, not to be confused with VMware's .xvm file extension, is apparently a hydra-headed thing that will start with xVM Server, described as a lightweight Xen-based enterprise-grade bare-metal hypervisor, and xVM Ops Center, a unified management console that uses the Facebook social networking approach of inviting participation.

Sun said the code would be released under the restrictive GPLv3 license.

The idea, Sun said, is to virtualize and manage mixed environments running Java, OpenSolaris and Linux platform software along with Windows across HP, Dell, IBM, Fujitsu and Sun x86 and Sparc hardware.

It is supposed to encompass all data center assets including the network, storage, applications and hardware provisioning - not just consolidate the server. Ops Center is supposed to handle what Sun called "planet-size" installations.

Sun says the xVM hypervisor will extend technologies like its ZFS file system widgetry, FMA predictive self-healing and Crossbow network virtualization - widgetry previously reserved to Solaris - to Windows and Linux guest instances to differentiate it.

Now all it has to do is to get the stuff, which it's been previewing recently as Project Virginia, production-ready and so it's set up openxvm.org, hoping to establish an open source community beavering away.

Sun is, it says, the second-largest contributor to the Xen open source project and has leveraged that work to come up with xVM.

The xVM Server isn't supposed to hit general availability until the second quarter of next year with a preview expected January 1. The first release of Ops Center is also due January 1.

Sun claims its hypervisor is "radically different" and says it spent a lot of time with Intel, AMD and Microsoft making sure it had a commercially attractive product. It plans to charge for support but hasn't disclosed any pricing.

In exchange for Sun's support for Red Hat's newfangled Linux Automation strategy, Red Hat's Xen-based challenge to VMware announced last week, Red Hat is supporting Sun's xVM strategy since it's open source.

Unlikely allies, they're supposed to ensure customers of mutual certification and support, they said, and they're going to fan the flames of libvert and libvert.org, the open source community bent on cross-platform virtualization management, so Sun, Red Hat and third-party management tools seamlessly interoperate across each other's virtualization platform.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux will be certified and supported as a guest on xVM and the same will be true for Solaris on RHEL so it's just minor accommodation here.