White Paper

3 Scripting WSMAN Operating System Deployment – Boot Network ISO
Executive Summary
This white paper is for systems administrators looking to program scripts with WSMAN clients and to
harness the power of the secure and standards-based WSMAN service.
Introduction
Dell PowerEdge servers equipped with Integrated Dell Remote Access Controller (iDRAC) provide
secure, simple, scriptable and standards-based remote management capability through Web Services
for Management (WSMAN). WSMAN is a management transport protocol that enables a user to access
systems management data objects and methods supported by the target platform. You can utilize the
WSMAN interface by scripting WSMAN using command-line tools such as winrm on Windows and
wsmancli on Linux. WSMAN can also be accessed from scripting languages like Python, which can run
on both Windows and Linux. You may need to read specification documents to understand the
terminology and concept in this document. If you are a systems administrator that typically works
with command-line tools and scripts, then this white paper should benefit you.
This document helps you:
(A) Get started on programmatically scripting with WSMAN using Python.
(B) Learn common APIs to leverage in your custom scripts.
WSMAN clients
There are two primary WSMAN clients described in this document:
 Windows Remote Management (WinRM) CLI for Windows
 OpenWSMAN CLI for Linux
Both these WSMAN clients are equivalent in most of their feature set. They allow usage of most of
the high frequency and high usage WSMAN operations. Reference the WinRM and OpenWSMAN CLI
sections for sample output of the command-line tool’s help menu.
You can find more information on installation and usage of these CLI tools in the Where to Find More
Information section. The section contains links to official reference guides from the CLI tool
providers.
WinRM CLI
Sample output of WinRM CLI invocation.
C:\>winrm
Windows Remote Management Command Line Tool