HP WBEM Services Software Developer's Kit for HP-UX Provider and Client Developer's Guide A.01

Introduction to WBEM, CIM, CIM Server, and Providers
A Common Model of Systems and Devices
Chapter 114
A Common Model of Systems and Devices
Web-Based Enterprise Management (WBEM) is a set of standards,
developed by the DMTF, to unify the management of enterprise
computing environments, allowing a variety of information processing
elements from different vendors to be managed in a uniform way.
Systems managed with WBEM may be general-purpose computer
systems running any operating system, or they may be printers, network
switches or routers, storage arrays, or any other device reachable on a
network.
WBEM goes beyond similar network management standards such as
SNMP and DMI, and defines the following specifications:
• a rich model of manageable entities featuring inheritance and
associations (the Common Information Model, or CIM)
• an extensible set of operations that can be performed on these objects
(CIM Operations)
• a protocol to encode the objects and operations for communication
over a network (xmlCIM).
The CIM standard specifies a model (or representation) for management
data. It defines a set of objects (or classes) that are commonly found in
information-processing environments. CIM has representations for
entities such as disks, files, user accounts, memory, video cards, software,
processes, queues, and many other familiar concepts.
The standard also specifies operations that can be performed on these
objects. A set of operations that can be performed on any type of object is
called the intrinsic methods, and includes accessing, creating and
deleting instances of these objects; modifying specific properties; and so
forth. Additional operations, called extrinsic methods, are defined for
specific classes of objects. The definition for the class
CIM_LogicalDevice, for example, contains the extrinsic methods
EnableDevice() and QuieseDevice(), which would not be meaningful
when referring to an object such as a CIM_Account, which is used to
represent a user's account.
Object definitions are organized in a hierarchy. The model features the
object-oriented concept of inheritance, where a new class of object may be
defined as "a kind of" an already defined class: a disk is a kind of device;
a device is a kind of managed element, and so forth. The new class has