Sun Microsystems took a step deeper into the world of virtualization on Tuesday by announcing xVM Ops Center, a data center automation tool aimed at managing both virtual and physical resources.

Sun recently announced xVM, a hypervisor for Intel and AMD servers. In the long run, it seeks to participate in more than the x86 virtual machine creation realm, an area that threatens to be commoditized before long. Sun also wants to discover, monitor, provision, and update virtual machines through xVM Ops Center.

Ops Center will become available as a commercial product sold on a subscription basis on Jan. 8, ahead of the commercial release of the xVM hypervisor, which means it will manage physical resources in its initial phase. The xVM hypervisor will become available in the second quarter of 2008.

"As xVM becomes available, Ops Center will take on management of the virtual part" of the data center as well, said Steve Wilson, VP of xVM in an interview.

Sun is not phased by the fact that VMware is already well established with 55% of x86 server virtualization market. In addition, open source Xen is available as a freely available alternative. It's still early in the wave of virtualization sweeping through enterprises and Sun believes alternatives to VMware will gain a share of the market.

Ops Center will be available on a subscription basis, which may give Sun a lower cost upfront advantage versus VMware, which sells products on a lifetime license basis. An Ops Center subscription will cost $100 to $350 a year per managed server, depending on the level of technical support sought.

For now Ops Center is focused on managing Sun xVM virtual machines. "Over time, we'll see what the requirement is for true, multiple virtual machine management," says Wilson.

Sun is trying to capitalize on its fault management architecture, the ability to isolate and heal a fault, such as a CPU failure, and DTrace, its ability to put probes into operating system operations and view the results, in its Solaris 10 operating system. Those features will be part of Ops Center in Solaris 10.

Part of Ops Center, the Common Agent Container, will become available as open source code Dec. 10 and the general release is planned for Jan. 8.