{"id":943,"date":"2012-06-28T10:47:00","date_gmt":"2012-06-28T10:47:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.technet.microsoft.com\/windowsserver\/2012\/06\/28\/open-management-infrastructure\/"},"modified":"2024-03-08T10:17:20","modified_gmt":"2024-03-08T18:17:20","slug":"open-management-infrastructure","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/windows-server\/blog\/2012\/06\/28\/open-management-infrastructure\/","title":{"rendered":"Open Management Infrastructure"},"content":{"rendered":"

Many years ago, Microsoft joined with other companies to define the Hardware Abstraction Layer (HAL), a set of standards to abstract the devices on a PC (and later, a server) for the OS.\u00a0 The HAL is the unsung hero of the computing industry, allowing an amazing level of choice and interoperability in the x86 ecosystem.\u00a0 It is one of the critical hidden technologies behind why all this stuff \u201cjust works.\u201d\u00a0 <\/em>
\nWith Windows Server 2012, Windows has shifted its focus to become a Cloud OS, so a new abstraction layer is required \u2013 a Datacenter Abstraction Layer or DAL.\u00a0 Microsoft is, once again, joining with other companies to define the DAL.\u00a0 Instead of starting from scratch or advancing proprietary standards, we are embracing standards-based management to accelerate the process so we can get the ecosystem and our customers to the cloud as quickly as possible.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

As we looked at the task of getting the industry to adopt standards-based management, we saw a couple of challenges.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

The first challenge was to convince the industry that standards-based management was credible and able to do complete management.\u00a0 We proved that with our big investments in standards-based management in Windows Server 2012.\u00a0 In this release, we are fully committed to standards-based management as the primary management path; DCOM is provided only for backwards compatibility.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

The next big challenge was to help the industry implement standards-based management.\u00a0 The existing open source implementations have a number of problems that stopped the ecosystem from embracing this approach.<\/em><\/p>\n

In today\u2019s blog, Otto Helweg and Wassim Fayed, Program Managers in the Windows Management team, describe what we did to address that concern.\u00a0 It is truly an exciting time to be working in the computer industry \u2013 as a community, we are all about to take this to the next level and our customers are going to reap huge rewards.\u00a0 What could be better than that?<\/em><\/p>\n

Microsoft and The Open Group<\/a> are going big on standards-based management with a new, free, open source technology called Open Management Infrastructure or OMI (formerly known as NanoWBEM).\u00a0\u00a0 We are working with Arista and Cisco to port OMI to their network switches for our Windows Azure and cloud data centers.\u00a0 Jeffrey Snover did a technology demonstration at TechEd Europe in which he used a common set of standards-based tools to manage a base-motherboard controller on a server, a Windows operating system, and an Arista switch running OMI.<\/p>\n

The public availability of OMI means that you can now easily compile and implement a standards-based management service into any device or platform from a free open-source package. Our goals are to remove all obstacles that stand in the way of implementing standards-based management so that every device in the world can be managed in a clear, consistent, coherent way and to nurture spur a rich ecosystem of standards-based management products.<\/p>\n

Today, datacenters\u00a0 comprise a slew of heterogeneous devices supplied by different hardware and platform vendors and requiring different tools and management processes. Companies are forced to write their own abstraction layer or to be locked into a single vendor, which limits their choice and agility. This problem can be solved only by moving the industry to adopt the right standard for datacenter devices and platform abstractions.<\/p>\n

In addition, the growth of cloud-based computing is , by definition, driving demand for more automation, which, in turn, will require the existence of a solid foundation built upon management standards. For standards-based management to satisfy today\u2019s cloud management demands, it must be sophisticated enough to support the diverse set of devices that are required and it must be easy to implement by hardware and platform vendors alike.\u00a0 The DMTF<\/a> CIM and WSMAN standards are up to the task, but implementing them effectively has been a challenge.\u00a0 Open Management Infrastructure (OMI) addresses this problem.<\/p>\n

Easy and Diverse Device Support<\/strong><\/span>
\nLet\u2019s start with a little history. Windows has long been a leader in implementing CIM, beginning with WMI (Windows Management Infrastructure). The Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF) Common Information Model (CIM) is an open standard that defines how managed elements are represented as a common set of objects and defines the relationships between them using associations.<\/p>\n

When WMI was first introduced as an out-of-box install for Windows NT 4.0, it implemented early versions of the standards and schemas. WMI used DCOM for remote management, because no standard protocol was defined at that time. In Windows Server 2012, we invested heavily in standards and remote management, synching WMI with the latest DMTF standards and protocols.<\/p>\n

The CIM standard is sophisticated and flexible enough to use as a management model for all devices \u2013 particularly datacenter devices. Although these DMTF standards have been around for years, they have been a challenge to implement, and existing implementations have been too large for mobile and embedded devices.\u00a0 To address these challenges, Microsoft has built a highly portable, small footprint, high performance CIM Object Manager called OMI that is designed specifically to implement the DMTF standards. We then worked with The Open Group to make the source code for OMI available to everyone under an Apache 2 license.\u00a0 OMI is written to be easy to implement in Linux and UNIX systems.<\/p>\n

Partners that adopt OMI will get the following:<\/p>\n