Web Services for Management Overview

The SMASH (Systems Management Architecture for Server Hardware) initiative is one of several related standards initiatives of the DMTF.

The SMASH profiles build on other DMTF standards, including the Common Information Model (CIM), an object-oriented approach to modeling managed resources throughout the distributed computing environment. CIM Schemas define classes and associations among the classes in several key areas. CIM Schemas build around a core schema, including devices, applications, network, and the system itself. A CIM object manager brokers requests for data from any of the managed elements.

Clients can use the CIM-XML protocol for CIMOM access. Clients can also use Web Services for Management (WS-Management), a SOAP-based protocol for accessing CIM data. The Perl library discussed in this appendix is an implementation of WS-Management client artifacts (stubs, bindings) for connecting to a WS-Management server and obtaining CIM data.

For information about CIM, SMASH, and WS-Management, visit the dmtf.org Web site. See the CIM SMASH/Server Management API Programming Guide for information on CIM/SMASH and ESX/ESXi.