The first commercial release of Sun xVM Ops Center is expected to be available on Jan. 8, 2008, and its open source version hosted on OpenxVM.org will be receiving code releases from Sun, starting with the contribution of the Common Agent Container (CAC) source code on Dec. 10, under the GNU General Public License version three (GPLv3).

Sun announced that a distribution of Sun xVM Ops Center will be made available via free download. Commercial software subscriptions will start at $100 (USD) per managed server and go up to $350, depending on the selected feature set. These subscriptions include support and network delivered services, reported Sun, who also announced a $10,000 Satellite Server subscription will be available that includes an on-site enterprise installation service and hands-on training.

Sun's commitment to the open source community is evident in its decision to release the source code of the CAC, which is the heart of the management infrastructure for many of Sun's products, including the Sun xVM Ops Center, the company said. 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.

The Sun xVM Ops Center is a highly scalable datacenter automation tool for complete management of heterogeneous global IT environments. It combines a range of lifecycle management functionality into an all-in-one tool, reducing the complexity of datacenter management. It's designed to simplify discovery, monitoring, operating system provisioning, comprehensive updates and patch management, firmware updates, and hardware management in cross-platform Linux and Solaris Operating System-based x86 and SPARC environments.

Oren Teich outlines the features as:

• Better managing datacenter consolidation, keeping guest OSes up-to-date and monitoring for virtual assets on a network
• Automating provisioning and updating OS instances (Solaris & Linux) to increase availability and utilization and minimize downtime
• More effectively deploy, manage and monitor security and compliance in IT operations, either locally or remotely

He also points out the new network architecture, noting its:

• Firewall friendliness. All communication is up and out, and it's all XML over HTTPS. So what? This means that the agent talks to the proxy, the proxy to the satellite. And it's all over the same ports that your network admin already has open, and is managing. No custom firewall rules, no custom network config, no painful installations!
• Scalability. You can now have hundreds of agents talking to each proxy, and hundreds of proxies talking to each satellite. Put a different proxy in each location, or use multiple in one location to really scale into the thousands of nodes.

Commenting on the soon-to-be released Sun xVM Ops Center, Steve Wilson, vice president, xVM, Sun, said, "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. Through Sun xVM Ops Center...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." [...read more...]

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