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.

Read the rest of the article from SYS-CON, here.