Sun has put out its promised xVM Ops Center, the 1.0 widgetry that will be used to manage its Xen-based xVM Server, its prospective contribution to the industry’s lengthening virtualization caravan when xVM come out this summer.

While it waits for the bare-metal hypervisor, Ops Center can amuse itself managing physical data centers. At least ones that are made of Solaris-, Red Hat- and SUSE-based Sparc and x86 machines.

Ops Center is something of a retread, a combination of what Sun used to call N1 System Manager and the patch management widgetry it got a while back when it acquired Israeli-based Aduva.

xVM marketing director Oren Teich, however, says Ops Center ain’t just recycled technology. Nope, its skills have been updated. Apparently Sun fussed with the back-end architecture and added a new user interface.

Ops Center is supposed to be highly scalable and manage servers, storage and the network from a single console, automating ugly stuff like firmware updates, bare metal operating system provisioning and patching.

It can find servers across the network even if they’re off and it’s supposed to be able to resolve problems by monitoring critical parameters, improving system security and stability. And as you might expect there’s compliance reporting via a view into system state, patch status and the software portfolio.

Teich says Ops Center is gentler than other people’s managers that blow out your firewalls and make you reconfigure your systems when you go to install them and, of course, he claims, nobody has anything quite like it.

In keeping with Sun’s great software giveaway scheme, it has released updated source code used to build Ops Center to the openxvm.org community under the controversial GPLv3 license.

Otherwise, the widgetry runs $10,000 a year for the base Satellite Server subscription plus $100-$350 a year per managed server depending on support level and network-delivered services.