The upcoming bare-metal hypervisor that Sun is developing starting from Xen, xVM Server, is expected for this summer (despite some rumors about an earlier release) along with a virtualization-friendly enterprise management solution: Ops Center 2.0.
While waiting for the launch, Sun published today the first image of a xVM Server managed by Ops Center 2.0:
xVM Server 1.0 and Ops Center 2.0 will be just a part of a much wider virtualization effort that Sun is putting in place and which includes an OS virtualization platform, Solaris Containers (now supporting Solaris 8 and 9 binaries), a desktop virtualization solution, VirtualBox (acquired from innotek), a connection broker, Sun VDI, and an interoperability agreement with Microsoft for its upcoming hypervisor Hyper-v.
In late January virtualization.info interviewed Steve Wilson, Vice President of xVM, who provided some insights about the overall strategy.