Sun introduced its new virtualization offering yesterday, the Sun xVM hypervisor - a very lightweight kernel that inherits proven virtualization technologies (like ZFS, FMA, Dtrace and Crossbow) from the Solaris kernel while supporting Linux, Windows and Solaris as guests - imbuing guest OSes with the properties of the host hypervisor.

That description comes from none other than Sun's CEO Jonathan Schwartz (pictured), who also noted yesterday:

"As with all our innovation, xVM is going to start first in the community, where we can engage the folks who'll help make this a success - if you have an interest in joining the developer/administrator community we'll build around openxVM and the OpsCenter management platform, come visit us at OpenxVM.org."

The announcement of Sun's free/open source virtualization roadmap, starting with xVM and xVM OpsCenter, its hypervisor and management product set, was the second big news of yesterday; the first was that Schwartz also invited Dell's Michael Dell to join him on stage during his (Schwartz's) keynote at Oracle Open World. (Henceforth Dell will be OEM'ing Solaris, and directly supporting customers running Solaris on Dell systems.)