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 Object may refer to: General meanings * Object (philosophy), a thing, being, or concept ** Object (abstract), an object which does not exist at any particular time or place ** Physical object, an identifiable collection of matter * Goal, an ...

and relationships between them. The

Distributed Management Task Force Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF) is a 501(c)(6) nonprofit industry standards organization that creates open manageability standards spanning diverse emerging and traditional IT infrastructures including cloud, virtualization, network, s ...

maintains the CIM to allow consistent

management Management (or managing) is the administration of an organization, whether it is a business, a nonprofit organization, or a Government agency, government body. It is the art and science of managing resources of the business. Management includ ...

of these managed elements, independent of their manufacturer or provider.

Overview

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 in expressing that CIM not only represents these managed elements and the management information, but also provides means to actively control and manage these elements. By using 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

(DMTF). A related standard is

Web-Based Enterprise Management In computing, Web-Based Enterprise Management (WBEM) comprises a set of systems-management technologies developed to unify the management of distributed computing environments. The WBEM initiative, initially sponsored in 1996 by BMC Software, C ...

(WBEM, also defined by DMTF) which defines a particular implementation of CIM, including protocols for discovering and accessing such CIM implementations.

Schema and specifications

The CIM standard includes the CIM Infrastructure Specification and the CIM Schema: *CIM Infrastructure Specification :The CIM Infrastructure Specification defines the architecture and concepts of CIM, including a language by which the CIM Schema (including any extension schema) is defined, and a method for mapping CIM to other information models, such as

SNMP Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) is an Internet Standard protocol for collecting and organizing information about managed devices on IP networks and for modifying that information to change device behaviour. Devices that typically ...

. The CIM architecture is based upon

UML The Unified Modeling Language (UML) is a general-purpose, developmental modeling language in the field of software engineering that is intended to provide a standard way to visualize the design of a system. The creation of UML was originally m ...

, so it is object-oriented: The managed elements are represented as CIM

class Class or The Class may refer to: Common uses not otherwise categorized * Class (biology), a taxonomic rank * Class (knowledge representation), a collection of individuals or objects * Class (philosophy), an analytical concept used differentl ...

es and any relationships between them are represented as CIM

association Association may refer to: *Club (organization), an association of two or more people united by a common interest or goal *Trade association, an organization founded and funded by businesses that operate in a specific industry *Voluntary associatio ...

Inheritance Inheritance is the practice of receiving private property, titles, debts, entitlements, privileges, rights, and obligations upon the death of an individual. The rules of inheritance differ among societies and have changed over time. Officia ...

allows specialization of common base elements into more specific derived elements. *CIM Schema :The

CIM Schema ''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 ...

is a conceptual schema which defines the specific set of objects and relationships between them that represent a common base for the managed elements in an IT environment. The CIM Schema covers most of today's elements in an IT environment, for example

computer system A computer is a machine that can be programmed to carry out sequences of arithmetic or logical operations ( computation) automatically. Modern digital electronic computers can perform generic sets of operations known as programs. These prog ...

operating system An operating system (OS) is system software that manages computer hardware, software resources, and provides common services for computer programs. Time-sharing operating systems schedule tasks for efficient use of the system and may also i ...

network Network, networking and networked may refer to: Science and technology * Network theory, the study of graphs as a representation of relations between discrete objects * Network science, an academic field that studies complex networks Mathematics ...

middleware Middleware is a type of computer software that provides services to software applications beyond those available from the operating system. It can be described as "software glue". Middleware makes it easier for software developers to implement c ...

, services and storage. Classes can be, for example: ''CIM_ComputerSystem'', ''CIM_OperatingSystem'', ''CIM_Process'', ''CIM_DataFile''. The CIM Schema defines a common basis for representing these managed elements. Since most managed elements have product and vendor specific behavior, the CIM Schema is extensible in order to allow the producers of these elements to represent their specific features seamlessly together with the common base functionality defined in the CIM Schema. :Updates to the CIM Schema are published regularly. 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.

Implementations

Infrastructure Implementations

Many vendors provide implementations of CIM in various forms: * Some operating systems provide a CIM implementation, for example: ** the

Windows Management Instrumentation Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI) consists of a set of extensions to the Windows Driver Model that provides an operating system interface through which instrumented components provide information and notification. WMI is Microsoft's impl ...

(WMI)

API An application programming interface (API) is a way for two or more computer programs to communicate with each other. It is a type of software interface, offering a service to other pieces of software. A document or standard that describes how ...

available in

Microsoft Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational technology corporation producing computer software, consumer electronics, personal computers, and related services headquartered at the Microsoft Redmond campus located in Redmond, Washin ...

Windows 2000 Windows 2000 is a major release of the Windows NT operating system developed by Microsoft and oriented towards businesses. It was the direct successor to Windows NT 4.0, and was released to manufacturing on December 15, 1999, and was officiall ...

and higher **the Windows Management Infrastructure (MI) API for Microsoft Windows 2012 and higher ** some

Linux distributions A Linux distribution (often abbreviated as distro) is an operating system made from a software collection that includes the Linux kernel and, often, a package management system. Linux users usually obtain their operating system by downloading one ...

with the SBLIM (Standards Based Linux Instrumentation for Manageability) project *Some implementations are Independent of the systems they support, for example: **Open Group's Pegasus **WSI's J WBEM Server There is also a growing number of tools market around CIM.

Management Standards based on the CIM Schema

Standards organizations have defined management standards based on the CIM Schema: * The

Storage Networking Industry Association The Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA) is a registered 501(c)(6) non-profit trade association incorporated in December 1997. SNIA has more than 185 unique members, 2,000 active contributing members and over 50,000 IT end users and sto ...

(SNIA) has heavily bought into using CIM and WBEM: they have defined their usage of CIM (called Storage Management Initiative – Specification or SMI-S) as a standard. * Some

server Server may refer to: Computing *Server (computing), a computer program or a device that provides functionality for other programs or devices, called clients Role * Waiting staff, those who work at a restaurant or a bar attending customers and su ...

manufacturers collaborate in the DMTF under the SMASH initiative to define CIM-based management of servers. * The

DASH The dash is a punctuation mark consisting of a long horizontal line. It is similar in appearance to the hyphen but is longer and sometimes higher from the baseline. The most common versions are the endash , generally longer than the hyphen ...

initiative in the DMTF attempts to define CIM-based management of desktop computers.

Communication protocols used

A number of protocols are defined for messages transmitted between clients and servers. The message protocols are transmitted on top of

HTTP The Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) is an application layer protocol in the Internet protocol suite model for distributed, collaborative, hypermedia information systems. HTTP is the foundation of data communication for the World Wide We ...

. There are two message types: # operational messages, which provoke a response from the receiver ( RPC) # export messages, which are indications/events.

CIM Operations over HTTP (CIM-XML)

CIM-XML forms part of the WBEM protocol family, and is standardised by the DMTF. CIM-XML comprises three specifications: # CIM Operations over HTTP # Representation of CIM using XML # CIM DTD

WS-Management

WS-MAN forms part of the WBEM protocol family, and is standardised by the DMTF. WS-MAN comprises 3 specifications: # WS-CIM Mapping Specification # WS-Management CIM Binding Specification # Web Services for Management (WS- Management) Specification

CIM operations over RESTful services

CIM-RS forms part of the WBEM protocol family, and is standardised by the DMTF. CIM-RS comprises three specifications: # CIM Operations Over RESTful Services # CIM-RS Protocol Specification # CIM-RS Payload Representation in JSON

References

External links

*, including CIM Schema and CIM Infrastructure Specification. *. *. *. *. *. {{DMTF Standards DMTF standards Open standards Computer standards