WS-Management (Web Services-Management) is a

DMTF 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 ...

open standard An open standard is a standard that is openly accessible and usable by anyone. It is also a common prerequisite that open standards use an open license that provides for extensibility. Typically, anybody can participate in their development due to ...

defining a

SOAP Soap is a salt (chemistry), salt of a fatty acid (sometimes other carboxylic acids) used for cleaning and lubricating products as well as other applications. In a domestic setting, soaps, specifically "toilet soaps", are surfactants usually u ...

-based

protocol Protocol may refer to: Sociology and politics * Protocol (politics) Protocol originally (in Late Middle English, c. 15th century) meant the minutes or logbook taken at a meeting, upon which an agreement was based. The term now commonly refers to ...

for the management of servers, devices, applications and various Web services. WS-Management provides a common way for systems to access and exchange management information across the

IT infrastructure Information technology infrastructure is defined broadly as a set of information technology (IT) components that are the foundation of an IT service; typically physical components (Computer hardware, computer and networking hardware and facilitie ...

Design

The specification is based on DMTF

s and

Internet standard In computer network engineering, an Internet Standard is a normative specification of a technology or methodology applicable to the Internet. Internet Standards are created and published by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). They allow ...

s for Web services. The specification is quite rich, supporting much more than get/set of simple variables, and in that it is closer to WBEM or Netconf than to

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 behavior. Devices that typically su ...

. A mapping of the

-originated Common Information Model into WS-Management was also defined.

History

WS-Management was originally developed by a coalition of vendors. The coalition started with

AMD Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. (AMD) is an American multinational corporation and technology company headquartered in Santa Clara, California and maintains significant operations in Austin, Texas. AMD is a hardware and fabless company that de ...

Dell Dell Inc. is an American technology company that develops, sells, repairs, and supports personal computers (PCs), Server (computing), servers, data storage devices, network switches, software, computer peripherals including printers and webcam ...

Intel Intel Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company headquartered in Santa Clara, California, and Delaware General Corporation Law, incorporated in Delaware. Intel designs, manufactures, and sells computer compo ...

Microsoft Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company, technology conglomerate headquartered in Redmond, Washington. Founded in 1975, the company became influential in the History of personal computers#The ear ...

Sun Microsystems Sun Microsystems, Inc., often known as Sun for short, was an American technology company that existed from 1982 to 2010 which developed and sold computers, computer components, software, and information technology services. Sun contributed sig ...

and expanded to a total of 13 members before being subsumed by the

in 2005. The DMTF has published the standards document DSP0226 with version 1.2 of September 30, 2014.

Implementations and application support

has implemented the WS-Management standard in

Windows Remote Management Windows Remote Management (WinRM) is the Microsoft implementation of the DMTF-standard WS-Management. It allows accessing or exchanging management information across a common network. Utilizing scripting objects or the built-in command-line tool, ...

1.1 (WinRM), available for

Windows XP Windows XP is a major release of Microsoft's Windows NT operating system. It was released to manufacturing on August 24, 2001, and later to retail on October 25, 2001. It is a direct successor to Windows 2000 for high-end and business users a ...

Windows Server 2003 Windows Server 2003, codenamed "Whistler Server", is the sixth major version of the Windows NT operating system produced by Microsoft and the first server version to be released under the Windows Server brand name. It is part of the Windows NT ...

Windows Vista Windows Vista is a major release of the Windows NT operating system developed by Microsoft. It was the direct successor to Windows XP, released five years earlier, which was then the longest time span between successive releases of Microsoft W ...

and

Windows Server 2008 Windows Server 2008, codenamed "Longhorn Server" (alternatives: "Windows Vista Server" or "Windows Server Vista"), is the seventh major version of the Windows NT operating system produced by Microsoft to be released under the Windows Server b ...

. * Using WS-Management (WinRM 2.0),

Windows PowerShell PowerShell is a shell program developed by Microsoft for task automation and configuration management. As is typical for a shell, it provides a command-line interpreter for interactive use and a script interpreter for automation via a langua ...

2.0 allows scripts and cmdlets to be invoked on a remote machine or a large set of remote machines. * WinRM 2.0 for Windows XP and Windows Server 2003 was released on Oct 26, 2009. * WinRM 3.0 for Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 was released on Sept 4 2012 and shipped in Windows 8 and Windows Server 2012. * A European research project (ITEA 2 programme, a strategic pan-European programme for advanced pre-competitive R&D in Software-intensive Systems and Services), named SODA (Service Oriented Device and Delivery Architecture) developed several implementations of WS-Management in

ANSI C ANSI C, ISO C, and Standard C are successive standards for the C programming language published by the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) and ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 22/WG 14 of the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) and the ...

Java Java is one of the Greater Sunda Islands in Indonesia. It is bordered by the Indian Ocean to the south and the Java Sea (a part of Pacific Ocean) to the north. With a population of 156.9 million people (including Madura) in mid 2024, proje ...

, and for

OSGi OSGi is an open specification and open source project under the Eclipse Foundation. It is a continuation of the work done by the OSGi Alliance (formerly known as the Open Services Gateway initiative), which was an open standards organization fo ...

. These implementations are specifically targeted to be used with an open SOAP

web service A web service (WS) is either: * a service offered by an electronic device to another electronic device, communicating with each other via the Internet, or * a server running on a computer device, listening for requests at a particular port over a n ...

protocol stack The protocol stack or network stack is an implementation of a computer networking protocol suite or protocol family. Some of these terms are used interchangeably but strictly speaking, the ''suite'' is the definition of the communication protoc ...

named DPWS (Devices Profile for Web Services), and were optimized to be integrated in micro-devices with only 100kB of memory. These implementations are

free software Free software, libre software, libreware sometimes known as freedom-respecting software is computer software distributed open-source license, under terms that allow users to run the software for any purpose as well as to study, change, distribut ...

, licensed under the

GNU Lesser General Public License The GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL) is a free-software license published by the Free Software Foundation (FSF). The license allows developers and companies to use and integrate a software component released under the LGPL into their own ...

(LGPL), and their

source code In computing, source code, or simply code or source, is a plain text computer program written in a programming language. A programmer writes the human readable source code to control the behavior of a computer. Since a computer, at base, only ...

is freely available for download. *

Intel Active Management Technology Intel Active Management Technology (AMT) is hardware and firmware for remote out-of-band management of select business computers, running on the Intel Management Engine, a microprocessor subsystem not exposed to the user, intended for monitor ...

, an

out-of-band management In systems management, out-of-band management (OOB; also lights-out management or LOM) is a process for accessing and managing devices and infrastructure at remote locations through a separate management plane from the production network. OOB all ...

suite, uses WS-Management as the out-of-band management protocol. *

OpenNMS OpenNMS is a free and open-source enterprise grade network monitoring and network management platform. It is developed and supported by a community of users and developers and by the OpenNMS Group, offering commercial services, training and suppo ...

, an open-source

network management Network management is the process of administering and managing computer networks. Services provided by this discipline include fault analysis, performance management, provisioning of networks and maintaining quality of service. Network managem ...

platform, includes a pure-Java WS-Management client library. This library enables WS-Management as a management protocol in OpenNMS. * By default WinRM HTTP uses port 80 and HTTPS uses port 443. On Windows 7 and higher the default ports are 5985 and 5986, respectively.

References

External links

WS-Management specifications

Openwsman: Open-source implementation of WS-Management

WinRM (Windows Remote Management): a Microsoft Windows implementation of WS-Management Protocol based on SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol)
{{DMTF Standards DMTF standards Computer standards Open standards Network management