Manageability Lingo, Standards, & Acronyms, Oh My!

Since the dawn of the 21st century (and even before) you have been hearing many items related to acronyms interchangeably describing manageability features within Microsoft products (as well as others.) For example, WMI has been at the heart of most Microsoft Manageability products and solutions given the fact it is one of the primary interfaces within the Windows operating systems. While Microsoft’s WMI ties mostly to its products, it is based upon a series of open, universal standards. And this is the heart of deciphering how acronyms and standards can be interchangeably used to describe the same entity.

So let’s weave through the sometimes confusing relationship between these manageability acronyms – WBEM, WMI, CIM, DMI, DTMF, WSMAN, WinRM, and SNMP of protocols/interfaces/standards. In this little game, I will try to go through these acronyms within the average blog post attention span. WMI is Microsoft’s implementation of the open Web-Based Enterprise Management (WBEM), which comes from the Distributed Management Task Force (an industry organization.) WBEM relies on protocols – which can come from legacy standards such as RPC (Remote-Procedure Call) or DCOM (Distributed Component Object Model) or more modernized http-based SOAP standards such as WinRM (Windows Remote Management) based on the WS-MAN (Web-Services Management) standard. SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol) itself, is is a command extension protocol designed to be used with HTTP (Hyper-Text Transport protocol – or the web) or SMTP (Simple Mail Transport Protocol – or internet email.)

The WMI interface – based upon the WBEM standard – is built upon an infrastructure centered upon the Common Information Model (CIM) and its respective Object Manager (CIMOM), is what links management applications and providers. The infrastructure also serves as the object-class store and, in many cases, as the storage manager for persistent object properties. WMI implements the store, or repository, as an on-disk database named the CIMOM Object Repository. As part of its infrastructure, WMI supports several APIs through which management applications access object data and providers supply data and class definitions.

Beyond WMI, WBEM’s architecture extends to a variety of underlying technologies besides WMI and Win32 because not everything is or will always be on Microsoft technologies – including the Desktop Management Interface (DMI), and the Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP)  Some of these standards define data storage schemas as well as interfaces. Some define commands within communication protocols. Some or more modernized. SNMP has been deprecated in the most recent versions of Windows in favor of technologies such as WinRM.

I like to use the relationship of WinRM and WMI (alongside their open counterpart standards WS-MAN and WBEM) by stating that one is a management protocol and one is a management interface.

To Read more, check out the standards themselves:

• https://www.dmtf.org/standards/wsman
• https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa384426.aspx
• https://www.dmtf.org/standards/wbem
• https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa394582(v=vs.85).aspx
• https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms811530.aspx
• https://www.w3.org/TR/soap/