The typical systems management paradigm of tree views has been around for a while now and copied throughout most systems management tools.  Is this the right approach to managing a dynamic virtual environment?

Mike Vizard of eWeek writes that there has been a lot of debate about whether IT organizations need to extend their existing systems management tools to embrace virtual machines or find new tools designed from the ground up to manage virtualization.     

He writes:

Hyper9 has released a systems management tool that relies more on a search paradigm associated with Web 2.0 interfaces to help system administrators manage things rather than the traditional hierarchical tree model found in most systems management tools.

The basic idea here is that systems administrators waste a lot of time hunting through tree structures to look for things. But in a world of virtualization that allows any virtual machine to change location dynamically, a tree structure may not be the best approach because a lot of things that might have been in one location yesterday could be somewhere else tomorrow.

Hyper9 argues that system administrators now need a search metaphor that can dynamically discover where any virtual asset is at any given moment and then present that information in the context of a search. This user interface not only makes it easier to find what they are looking for, administrators can also leverage search technology to compare various states of virtual machines in the same way that end users leverage search to do comparison shopping.

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Read the entire eWeek article about search coming to systems management.