 Email
this Article  Printer-Friendly
 Order
Reprints
[Focus]
What is WBEM?
Greg Todd
InstantDoc
#3568
July 1998
Main
Article
• The
Future of Systems Management
What Is WBEM?
In 1996, BMC Software, Cisco Systems, Compaq Computer, Intel,
and Microsoft sponsored the Web-Based Enterprise Management (WBEM)
initiative, an effort to provide a unifying mechanism for describing and
sharing management information. Now more than 70 companies publicly
support WBEM, including Computer Associates, IBM/Tivoli, and HP.
Administrators of systems running on multiple platforms currently have
no easy way to obtain management data from their different platforms. They
must use individual APIs or a separate console for each management
application. However, WBEM can provide one interface to multiple platforms
because it's independent of the different languages, execution
environments, and user interfaces (UIs) those platforms use to host
management applications. WBEM defines a common mechanism for sharing
management information, but it doesn't dictate how vendors implement
management solutions. WBEM does not require the use of a runtime
environment or programming language model, nor does it mandate the use of
any particular management application, console, operating system (OS), or
graphical environment. WBEM provides a consistent view of managed
environments without locking customers in to one management framework,
protocol, or platform.
Two main goals motivated WBEM's founders to create this cross-platform
management technology. First, they needed to standardize the publishing of
management data. To achieve this goal, the Desktop Management Task Force
(DMTF) adopted a standardized data model called the Common Information
Model (CIM) in 1997. CIM is an object-oriented schema for describing a
system's management objects. It offers one extensible data description
mechanism for all enterprise systems, network devices, and other
management tools such as applications, peripherals, and databases. CIM
supports data inheritance and associations and is independent of any
execution environment or programming language model. You can use CIM to
describe objects that you implement in Java, distributed component object
model (DCOM), Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA), or any
other object environment.
Second, WBEM's founders needed a standard method for accessing
management information. Previously, administrators had to use customized
API calls and software designed specifically for each environment that
they wanted to access management data from. WBEM provides one method for
accessing management data that originates from disparate sources.
Figure
A shows the general WBEM architecture. The bottom of Figure
A shows various sources of management data that WBEM can use,
including Windows Management Interface (WMI), Desktop Management Interface
(DMI), and Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP). The next level shows
the CIM Object Provider, which acts as a translation layer for the CIM
Object Manager (CIMOM). The CIMOM handles the interactions between CIM,
management applications, and the CIM Object Provider. In addition, the
CIMOM handles security, event registration, and notification services. At
the top of Figure A,
Management Application includes any application that uses management data
to provide value to users, such as a central management console or a
central management data repository.
The original WBEM specification proposed that HyperMedia Management
Protocol (HMMP) serve as the standard protocol for publishing and
accessing data. Although HMMP is part of the WBEM specification at press
time, I expect WBEM organizers to get rid of HMMP in the near future and
adopt Extensible Markup Language (XML) instead. (For the latest
information about WBEM, visit http://wbem.freerange.com.)
|