In our research on enterprise virtualization use, we have heard many a server admin, data center director, and service engineer complain that as they have virtualized servers, it has gotten harder for people to find things when they need them. These folks are not buying/installing/using new tools to help them manage their virtualized infrastructure; they are using only the tools that come with their platform (if any) and the tools they already had, which are typically only partially useful and applicable.

Applying search to virtual servers is rather like applying it to physical ones, of course, but you can also apply it to the configuration data and logging information coming from the host boxes and hypervisors, so that it can become possible to map virtual to physical assets and do things like limit search to all the guests on the host holding a virtual server that has shown some odd behavior or logged some unusual activity. A general purpose search tool doesn’t need to understand the nesting relationship of the entities from which it is harvesting information in order for users to get benefits.

Search also scales pretty transparently for the end user; the user interface does not grow in complexity as the number, types, or nesting of data sources behind it do.

As I mentioned in a previous blog entry, the need to repurpose tools is pretty much unavoidable, and this is another great example of what drives IT to do it. Folks need to play the odds and get general-purpose tools where possible, and, as this shows, search is an excellent example of such a tool.