System information

generally available for details on the DMI interface. You can find information
about that at the following Web site:
http://www.dmtf.org
All the manufacturers who participated in the DMTF (Desktop Management Task
Force) have agreed to implement the DMI standard interface within their
products. This interface is used to access management information from the
products to manage all the products from different manufacturers with one
interface, which means that you can manage different components within your
network with only one management product. The DMI interface has not been
implemented in every product yet, but you can always see new product
announcements from a lot of manufacturers where they have implemented the
DMI interface. We can use the DMI browser within TME 10 NetFinity, which is
actually the DMI Services, to access this interface. In the following example we
show you one of the examples on what kind of information you can get using this
function. See Figure 23 for the graphical user interface to access this service.
Figure 23. DMI Functions
We accessed the DMI service layer on a remote workstation and received
information that the Inventory function did not show. The amount and quality of
information from the DMI layer depends on the manufacturer, who implemented
the DMI layer in the component. In our case, we accessed the DMI layer of
another TME 10 NetFinity workstation. As you can see, you can get a lot of very
detailed information about the hardware and software configuration (for example,
about hardware adapters and how they are configured). This DMI browsing
function can also be used to retrieve information from non-NetFinity components
such as hubs and routers. In Figure 24 on page 20 you can see some details of
the DMI data flow.
Chapter 2. NT Systems Management Functions 19