According to the Register, Sun is close to releasing xVM Ops Center, the physical and virtual resource management stack for the xVM product family.  The virtualization management product is expected January 8, 2008.

The software is based on the open-source Xen hypervisor project. The lineup will eventually center around xVM Server (the hypervisor part) and xVM Ops Center (the management part). Compare the concept to virtualization leader VMWare's ESX and Virtual Center respectively, and you shouldn't be too far off.

Sun pegs xVM Ops Center as a all-in-one virtualized datacenter "automation tool" (read: does stuff like discovery, monitoring, OS provisioning, updates and patches) using a simple, Ajax-based interface. It's a shakeup of Sun's N1 Systems Manager (N1SM) and Sun Connection, formerly known as Update Connection Enterprise, formerly known as Aduva OnStage.

Ops is friendly to cross-platform Linux and Solaris OS-based x86 and SPARC environments.

The article reports that there will be a distribution of Ops Center made available as a free download and a commercial version will be available as well for a cost of $10,000.  This would include on-sight installation and training and then $100-$350 annually, depending on the feature set selected.