Web-Based Enterprise Management (WBEM) is a Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF) initiative intended to provide enterprise system managers with a standardized, cost-effective method for end station management. The WBEM initiative encompasses a multitude of tasks, ranging from simple workstation configuration to full-scale enterprise management across multiple platforms. Central to the initiative is the Common Information Model (CIM), an extensible data model for representing objects that exist in typical management environments, and the Managed Object Format (MOF) language for defining and storing modeled data.
Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI) is an implementation of the WBEM initiative for Microsoft® Windows® platforms
WMI consists of two main components: the Core and the SDK.
The WMI architecture consists of the following components:
Management applications process or display data from managed objects, which are logical or physical enterprise components. These components are modeled using CIM and accessed by applications through Windows Management. Providers use the Windows Management API to supply Windows Management with data from managed objects, to handle requests from applications and to generate notification of events.
The management infrastructure consists of Windows Management (for handling the communication between management applications and providers) and the Windows Management repository (for storing data). The Windows Management repository holds static management data. Dynamic data is generated only on request from the providers. Data is placed in the repository using either the MOF language compiler or the Windows Management API.
Applications and providers communicate through Windows Management using the Windows Management API, which supplies such services as event notification and query processing.
The following diagram shows the interrelationship of these components:
The Common Information Model (CIM) presents a consistent and unified view of all types of logical and physical objects in a managed environment. Managed objects are represented using object-oriented constructs such as classes. The classes include properties that describe data and methods that describe behavior. The CIM is designed by the DMTF to be operating system and platform independent, however the Microsoft implementation predominates the specification. The WBEM technology includes an extension of the CIM for the Microsoft Windows operating system platforms. Please refer to the DMTF CIM schema on DMTF web site for more information.
The CIM defines three levels of classes:
All classes can be related by inheritance, where a child class includes data and methods from its parent class. Inheritance relationships are not typically visible to the management application using them, nor are the applications required to know the inheritance hierarchy. Class hierarchies can be obtained using applications that are included in the WMI Tools (see the WMI Tools at http://www.microsoft.com for more information).
Windows Management also supports association classes. Association classes link two different classes to model a user-defined relationship, and are visible to management applications. Windows Management defines association classes to support system classes. Third-party developers can also define association classes for their management environment.
WBEM supports the concept of schemas to group the classes and instances that are used within a particular management environment. The Platform SDK includes two schemas: the CIM schema and the Microsoft Win32 schema. The CIM schema contains the class definitions for the first two levels of the CIM. These classes represent managed objects that are part of every management environment regardless of platform. The Win32 schema contains class definitions for managed objects that are part of a typical Win32 environment.
For additional information on CIM, visit http://www.dmtf.org.
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