There's a lot of debate about whether IT organizations need to extend there existing systems management tools to embrace virtual machine or find new tools that were designed from the ground up to manage virtualization. But regardless of what side of the debate you're on the folks at Hyper9 would argue that both sides are wrong when it comes to the structure of those tools.

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.

Hyper9 readily admits that it is not trying to be the most comprehensive systems management tool on the block. Instead, it has opted to concentrate on the top 20 or 30 things that administrators commonly need to focus on. Anything outside of those capabilities Hyper9 will support by invoking the APIs of another virtualization management tool such as the ones made available by VMware or Microsoft.

Like many companies in the virtualization management space, Hyper9 plans to make a free version of its tool available. But the full feature version of the tool will probably cost about $500. Odds are good that other providers of system administration tools are going to be revisiting their approach to user interfaces as the influence of Web 2.0 technologies continues to grow within the enterprise. The folks at Hyper9 are among the first vendors to take us down a path the hopefully will make the daily life of the average systems administrator a whole lot easier.