Sun Microsystems announced on Wednesday that it would launch a Xen-based hypervisor for generating virtual machines. Called xVM, the new virtualization product line was unveiled with the occasion of Oracle’s OpenWorld conference from San Francisco by Sun Microsystems CEO, Jonathan Schwartz.

xVM contains two components: the xVM Server, Sun's virtualization server, which will include code derived from work of the Xen open source community and the xVM Ops Center, which will be the management console.

AMD, Intel, MySQL, Quest Software, Red Hat and Symantec are a few of the many hardware, software, operating system and management companies endorsing Sun's vision for the future of virtualization.

Sun also said that it was going to invest no less than $2 billion in the xVM project. On the other hand, the xVM Ops Center has been already validated to run on 1,000 system configurations and it is expected to be released in December.

However, after Jonathan Schwartz announced the xVM project, he was joined onstage by Dell’s CEO, Michael Dell, who made public that their companies agreed to distribute Sun’s Solaris 10 OS on Dell’s PowerEdge Servers.

As part of the relationship, Dell and Sun will cooperate on system certification and the development of offerings based on Solaris and Dell solutions. In addition, Dell and Sun have agreed to work together to secure support from key ISVs for Solaris on Dell PowerEdge servers.

"Part of our focus to simplify IT means delivering customers choice and by adding Solaris to our solutions set we are able to do that," said Michael Dell, chairman and CEO, Dell.