Ask the Windows 2000 Dev Team

  • Article

Every other week we put your How-Come-You-Did-That questions to the Windows 2000 development team. Submit your questions here.

Enterprise Network-Management Standards, Managed Objects on a Network

Q: As an administrator, I know that my servers do not always perform as well as we need them to perform. How do I know what's going on with my servers if I use Windows 2000?

A: Windows 2000 supports the Web-based Enterprise Management (WBEM) initiative. It was originated by a consortium headed by BMC Software, Microsoft, Compaq, BMC, Cisco, and Intel, and is now managed by the Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF). WBEM proposes a set of standards for managing the enterprise network. WBEM defines standards for the structures and conventions necessary to access information about the managed objects. It also supports centralization of information so that different clients and management tools can provide, retrieve, and analyze data. Since you don't want just anyone doing performance tuning, WBEM also supports authorized access to managed objects from anywhere in the network so that these objects can be analyzed and manipulated. The Windows 2000 implementation of WBEM is called Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI).

Q: What kinds of managed objects are we talking about?

A: Managed objects are both physical and logical devices on a computer, such as disk drives, processors, and printers. These hardware or software system components are represented as an instance of a WBEM class. Information about managed objects is supplied by data and event providers, as well as by the Common Information Model Object Manager (CIMOM). Managed objects have properties, methods, and events, and together contribute to the overall performance of a computer. The WMI Software Development Kit (SDK) provides a Component Object Model (COM) API for manipulating these managed objects, including remote management, performance tuning, and monitoring events from managed objects. You can take advantage of a rich query language that enables detailed queries of the information model. If you prefer, there is a scriptable API that enables management application developers to use Microsoft Visual Basic® or the Microsoft Windows® Script Host (WSH).

Q: So because of Web-Based Enterprise Management, I can monitor and tune equipment in my enterprise from Windows 2000?

A: Yes, the WBEM initiative is intended to solve the problem of collecting end-to-end management and diagnostic data in enterprise networks that may include hardware from multiple vendors, numerous protocols and operating systems, and a legion of distributed applications. WMI works in conjunction with the Microsoft Management Console, of course. There are WMI extensions for the Windows Driver Model (WDM) that provide a set of Windows Device Driver Interfaces (DDI) for instrumenting data within the driver models native to Windows, so original equipment manufacturers and independent hardware vendors can easily extend the instrumented data set. The WMI SDK has details on WMI for network administrators and system managers, for application developers, for WMI provider writers, and a complete reference for the WMI APIs.