Chapter 14: Transition to WBEMCIM

Overview

If your company manufactures a range of products with a well-proven, proprietary management interface, provided by software which has reached its steady-state maintenance mode, and if there is no discernible customer pressure to change, then this chapter is not for you.

If you work for a new company without shipped product, and have decided that your first released product will be based on WBEM/CIM, then this chapter is not for you either.

Instead, I am writing here for engineers and programmers in the tens of thousands of companies with shipped product, the management of which is based on proprietary protocols or SNMP or a mixture of both. This installed base cannot be discarded overnight but there is mounting customer pressure for service-level management and alignment of management interfaces with your competitor's product. And, of course, your competitor has used WBEM/CIM. There may also be internal pressure to reduce the maintenance cost of the existing management system.

There are many ways to design a system and I shall do no more in this chapter than outline a few. A tool that will appear more than once is the use of the MappingStrings qualifier; I describe this important qualifier in appendix E.

The next few sections describe practical architectures, but there is something of an underlying, theoretical structure beneath them. This is covered in part in Chapter 6 and Chapter 7 of the CIM specification (DSP0004) and I touch on it briefly on page 265. If you are familiar with this theory, then you will realise that I am applying the so-called "domain" interoperability technique.