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WBEM/CIM (DMTF) Anyone?

Posted by Cliff on from the do-you-use-this-standard dept.

semanticgap asks: "My employer is seeking to revamp the way its numerous servers and workstations are managed, and we're considering developing or piecing something together that is based on the DMTF CIM and WBEM specs. There are a few open source tools out there that implement these, e.g. Pegasus or IBM's SBLIM, and the spec seems to have been in development for years and supported by big guys like IBM, Sun, M$, etc. Does anyone use DMTF standards out there, and do you think it has a future?"

2 of 15 comments (clear)

  1. WBEM/CIM (DMTF) by bgins · · Score: 5, Informative
    That's a good question. I don't know its current status as far as availability, interoperability and level of implementation.

    For those who have never heard of WBEM, it was an initiative to provide a framework for cross-platform management of machines.

    • WBEM = Web Based Enterprise Management
    • CIM = Common Information Model
    • DMTF = Distributed Management Task Force
    WBEM comes in different flavors based on whose implementation on whose platform:
    • SBLIM = IBM's "Standards Based Linux Instrumentation for Manageability" (Open-Source)
    • WMI = Microsoft's "Windows Management Instrumentation"

    Each implementation of WBEM consists of services which expose some core set of platform/application/host-specific objects via a (theoretically) platform-independent CIM object.

    M$ had some sample scripts in the resource kit at one time, but the best link I can find is this. (One of these scripts found its way into Knowledge Base article Q271362; it gives you the short names of services so that you can start and stop services from a W2K command line or script; my version is here).

    There seems to be a WBEM implementation for Solaris as well in JIRO, but my guess is that it's a small subset of CIM for managing storage devices.

    I would recommend seeing what SW is out there from Computer Associates, Tivoli, and similar places that is "cross platform", particularly ones that might be MMC-based, or best yet that say they use WBEM/WMI/..., and get a trial version to see how interoperable it really is. Then decide how much functionality you need, and whether it's already hardwired into the implementations for your platforms or whether you want to buy something or implement it yourself.

  2. Re:Acronym expansion anyone? by sartin · · Score: 2, Informative

    Umm, if you can't expand the acronyms on your own, are you really likely to have a good answer to the question?

    • DMTF - Distributed Management Task Force. This link was in the article (and CIM and WBEM have quick links on the DMTF home) for those who read the article and were curious.
    • WBEM - Web-Based Enterprise Management
    • CIM - Common Information Model. This is the only one in this list that didn't pop up feeling lucking at Google
    • SBLIM - Standards Based Linux Instrumentation for Manageability. This I got directly from link in the article.