While at VMworld, we had the opportunity to catch up with and demo the Hyper9 product for Scott Lowe. We were happy to get on his dance card during the show, as his calendar filled up quickly.
Scott had some amazing live coverage of VMworld - the guy was everywhere! He covered keynote sessions, breakout sessions, the show floor and then had side meetings with vendors on top of that. I'm not sure how he did it all, but he did. If you haven't checked out his full coverage of the show, you should. He spent a lot of time doing the right things, and it paid off for everyone in the form of solid coverage and explanation.
After our meeting, Scott posted the following information on his blog:
Hyper9
Next up was Hyper9, who recently announced their search-based management product. It’s not available yet, but they will soon be opening a private beta and expect to release the product by the end of the year, if I recall correctly. Hyper9 uses the search paradigm to allow administrators to find subsets of virtual machines based on a wide variety of criteria, then see additional information about those VMs or perform actions on those VMs. Hyper9 uses a unique search query syntax but provides various ways of helping to simplify that so the users don’t have to learn the syntax. In addition, Hyper9 will offer the idea of workspaces, which are in essence saved queries, that will allow a user to consistently return to a specific subset of systems, like all the hosts whose utilization exceeds 75% or all the VMs lacking this particular patch. I agree with the guys from Hyper9 that the old “tree and folder” approach that has been used in so many applications for so long is getting a bit tired and unwieldy, but I myself am not so sure the general population is ready to ditch it for a search-based interface. Nevertheless, I do find what I saw of the product quite intriguing.
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You can read the rest of this post on Scott Lowe's blog.