The Common Information Model ( CIM ) is an open standard that defines how managed elements in an IT environment are represented as a common set of objects and relationships between them.
6-508: CIM Schema is a computer specification, part of Common Information Model standard, and created by the Distributed Management Task Force . It is a conceptual diagram made of classes, attributes, relations between these classes and inheritances, defined in the world of software and hardware . This set of objects and their relations is a conceptual framework for describing computer elements and organizing information about
12-532: A common model of information, management software can be written once and work with many implementations of the common model without complex and costly conversion operations or loss of information. The CIM standard is defined and published by the Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF). A related standard is Web-Based Enterprise Management (WBEM, also defined by DMTF) which defines a particular implementation of CIM, including protocols for discovering and accessing such CIM implementations. The CIM standard includes
18-581: The CIM Infrastructure Specification and the CIM Schema : CIM is the basis for most of the other DMTF standards (e.g. WBEM or SMASH ). It is also the basis for the SMI-S standard for storage management. Many vendors provide implementations of CIM in various forms: There is also a growing number of tools market around CIM. Standards organizations have defined management standards based on
24-604: The CIM Schema: A number of protocols are defined for messages transmitted between clients and servers. The message protocols are transmitted on top of HTTP . There are two message types: CIM-XML forms part of the WBEM protocol family, and is standardised by the DMTF. CIM-XML comprises three specifications: WS-MAN forms part of the WBEM protocol family, and is standardised by the DMTF. WS-MAN comprises 3 specifications: CIM-RS forms part of
30-484: The CIM to allow consistent management of these managed elements, independent of their manufacturer or provider. One way to describe CIM is to say that it allows multiple parties to exchange management information about these managed elements. However, this falls short of fully capturing CIM's ability not only to describe these managed elements and the management information, but also to actively control and manage them. By using
36-546: The managed environment. This schema is the basis of other DMTF standards such as WBEM , SMASH or SMI-S for storage management. The CIM schema is object-based and extensible, allowing manufacturers to represent their equipment using the elements defined in the core classes of CIM schema. For this, manufacturers provide software extensions called providers , which supplement existing classes by deriving them and adding new attributes. Common Information Model (computing) The Distributed Management Task Force maintains
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