With a ranking Microsoft ideologue dancing attendance, Sun Wednesday trotted out and open sourced xVM Server, its promised Xen-based bare-metal hypervisor, and xVM Ops Center 2.0, its management update. It will sell support, including patches and updates, at prices ranging from $500 to $3,000 per physical server a year for the server (figure four-socket increments) and $100-$350 per managed server for Ops Center, provided you buy a required $10,000 Satellite Server annual subscription.

And since the stuff is open source, Sun launched xVMserver.org, an open source community to collect outside contributions and distribute source code downloads under the GPLv3 license.

The mojo fleshes out Sun’s virtualization portfolio, which it describes as “desktop-to-data center” and “designed to operate at Internet scale.” Customers are supposed to be able to “virtualize everything and manage anywhere.”

The portfolio, which targets the heterogeneous x86 mainstream – from Sun’s point-of-view Windows, Linux, Solaris not to mention Sparc – includes its acqired xVM VirtualBox software for desktop virtualization and its Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) software for virtual desktop consolidation and management.

The Microsoft guy showed up because Microsoft’s Hyper-V is being certified to run on xVM and vice versa. He said virtualization will be ubiquitous.

Sun claims that xVM Server can save users up to 50% off their virtualization infrastructure costs compared to rivals like VMware.

The hypervisor has built-in browser-based management via an embedded web server and so-called enterprise-class scalability, reliability and security, functionality like ZFS and Dtrace borrowed from OpenSolaris.

It interoperates with VMware and uses the same virtual hard disk and virtual appliance formats so workloads can move between it and ESX.

xVM Ops Center 2.0, meant to be a VMware leveler for Xen, gives Sun a way to manage both virtual and physical environments “down to the firmware,” adding virtual guest management to its existing ability to manage physical infrastructures.

Sun says it’s talking about the whole data center lifecycle: discovery, provisioning, updating, monitoring, reporting of physical and virtual assets and compliance reporting via one unified browser-based interface.

And Ops Center makes using xVM’s live migration easier.

Both xVM Server and xVM Ops Center have been designed for third-party integration by exposing a public API that uses the industry standard Web Services Management protocol.

Sun says ISVs are extending the xVM portfolio with solutions for areas such as virtual lab management, capacity planning, virtualization management, security and performance monitoring. It says channel partners have built competency, implementation and deployment solution practices around the portfolio.

Sun said it’s working on storage virtualization.