Standards

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In today's complex, multiplatform enterprise, unifying systems management under a common infrastructure is a significant force driving many business decisions. With Linux projects providing specialized applications and functionality, Unix resources running mission-critical systems, and the inevitable Windows network serving the needs of the rank-and-file end user, the challenge facing IT departments is to manage all these disparate resources in the most economical, secure, and efficient manner possible.

Virtually every organization is faced with management tasks such as finding out if a router is down, monitoring the status of a database, or patch distribution. The systems management duties of an IT department can be as varied as the systems they are managing. Let's take the example of an enterprise's Unix resources. It's rare to find true homogeneity across Unix systems, let alone the entire enterprise. A typical network may be running a wide mix of Unix and Linux systems for financial systems, HR, Web servers, etc. With so many different versions of Unix, IT departments are faced with an equally large number of choices when it comes to managing these systems. Now expand that scope to include a set of Linux systems - not to mention the Windows systems - and the management nightmare only increases.

With all these disparate systems in a typical enterprise, there is a constant challenge to find a simple, overreaching management tool. Managing a single application on a single system is easy. Managing a single application on multiple systems isn't much more difficult. But managing multiple applications on multiple platforms is where the real challenge lies. Today's enterprise can include everything from Unix, Linux, Windows, Macintosh, and Java to telephone systems, etc.

Many platform vendors and third parties provide specific tools aimed at delivering a comprehensive infrastructure for managing a homogeneous environment (such as Microsoft Systems Management Server). If you run one platform only, those tools work great but they cannot address management needs beyond the platform they were designed for. Conversely, many vendors provide cross-platform management tools that fulfill only specific cross-platform management tasks, such as storage or backup, but ignore the rest of an IT manager's needs.

The reason the single-platform tools work so well in their "closed" worlds is because they use a closed set of protocols or proprietary languages. However, the protocols change from platform to platform and from solution to solution. Task-specific tools can cross platform boundaries because vendors have developed and implemented the solution specifically for each covered platform, usually by introducing a complex additional layer of infrastructure. The task of expanding that one-to-one relationship to a larger set of management tasks is simply too costly.

So the IT manager is left with a dilemma - consolidate platforms to create homogeneity (a difficult or impossible task in most organizations) or continue managing in a fragmented ad hoc manner (an expensive, complex, and cumbersome undertaking at best).

Bringing Uniformity to Disparate Systems

If all platforms used a common set of management standards, creating management tools to reach across platform boundaries would be significantly simplified. A standard does exist and it's called Web-Based Enterprise Management (WBEM). WBEM was created specifically to address this problem.

The Distributed Management Task Force describes WBEM as "a set of management and Internet standard technologies developed to unify the management of enterprise computing environments." WBEM provides guidelines and standards that allow IT managers, solution providers, and OS vendors to apply consistent management infrastructure to any system and/or device (Unix, Linux, Windows, routers, switches, storage devices, telephone systems, whatever).

The WBEM standard includes three primary components:

• Common Information Model (CIM): CIM provides a common definition of management information for systems, networks, applications, and services, and allows for vendor extensions. CIM's common definitions enable vendors to exchange semantically rich management information between systems throughout the network. CIM is composed of a specification and a schema. The schema provides the actual model descriptions, while the specification defines the details for integration with other management models.
• xmlCIM encoding: Guidelines for encoding CIM data in XML, it's the standard protocol for exchanging CIM information.
• CIM Operations over HTTP: The transport mechanism or method for communication with a WBEM server.

WBEM is designed as an aggregating technology to bring all other management technologies (such as SNMP, DMI, IPMI, JMX, and CLI) together under a common umbrella. Through WBEM, any organization can write providers that bring network resources of any kind into a WBEM-enabled management framework. Providers are fundamentally translators that exist at or very near a managed system or device to provide communication with each instrumented object in a management schema. The main advantage WBEM has over some commercial management solutions is the elimination of complex middleware to "translate" information from systems or devices, making it usable for front-end management tools (such as consoles, command-line interfaces, existing management systems, etc.).

An Open Source Implementation of WBEM

Much of the development legwork associated with implementing WBEM on an enterprise-wide basis has already been addressed through an open source project called OpenWBEM (www.openwbem.com). OpenWBEM has taken the direction and standards of WBEM and implemented them to create a stable, scalable, and very well-supported infrastructure upon which IT managers, OS vendors, and solution providers can build management tools. To date, the OpenWBEM project has benefited from more than 10 man-years of effort.

OpenWBEM is an enterprise-grade, open source implementation of WBEM, written in C++, suitable for commercial and noncommercial applications. It provides a foundation for the development of management frameworks that overcome cross-platform barriers and empower true interoperability. Developers can use OpenWBEM as a management agent to provide applications for configuration and change management, system health monitoring, enterprise-wide management functionality, and virtually anything else imaginable.

OpenWBEM provides the agent-side implementation of WBEM - including the necessary protocols and APIs - that allows management tools to effectively operate in a homogeneous management environment.

As an example of OpenWBEM's potential, let's look at the task of hardware inventory. If an enterprise includes SUSE Linux 8 Enterprise, AIX 5.1, Solaris 8, Mac OS X, and Windows resources, performing hardware inventory across all these platforms would typically require many different tools, many different operations, and five times the effort of inventory on a single platform. Now with a WBEM-enabled hardware inventory solution applied natively to each platform, simply writing appropriate providers allows a single tool to perform hardware inventory across the entire enterprise - one tool, one task covering all five platforms.

OpenWBEM provides the glue that allows managers to integrate disparate technologies in a unified management method without forcing all managed systems, devices, etc., to a lowest common denominator. It is a unifying technology that brings the widely fragmented world of today's systems management technologies under a common umbrella.

Many organizations, both commercial and private, have adopted OpenWBEM and written providers and tools to ease the cross-platform management burden. As a result, many of the providers required by enterprise managers already exist. There are even some commercial solutions available that leverage OpenWBEM to deliver true cross-platform management. Let me provide a few examples.

OpenWBEM in Commercial Applications

With the introduction of SUSE LINUX Enterprise Server 9, Novell included OpenWBEM and CIM as key elements of its platform-management capabilities. Eric Anderson, director of software development at Novell, said, "OpenWBEM and CIM-based management provide significant flexibility and functionality. The advantages presented through OpenWBEM - both from a technical and competitive viewpoint - are the driving force behind Novell's support for this open source standard."

In its support of OpenWBEM, Novell has enabled SUSE LINUX Enterprise Server 9 to communicate with any WBEM client. It provides access to a large set of key management functionality including Samba configuration, logical volume management, access to operating system information, access to information on computer systems, and disk drive statistics. In fact, Novell has open sourced a significant number of providers already. Providers are also available from IBM and others. With a little research, a good number of providers can be found, and the number is growing almost daily.

In addition, several storage vendors have also adopted OpenWBEM as the basis for their storage management. SNIA has adopted WBEM as its management technology (www.snia.org/smi/home) and several storage vendors have selected OpenWBEM as their implementation.

At Vintela, we've used OpenWBEM as the core technology in a solution we call Vintela Management Extensions (VMX). Through implementing OpenWBEM natively for a number of platforms (Unix, Linux, and Mac), and by writing a very large set of platform-specific providers, we functionally extended the reach of Microsoft Systems Management Server (SMS) 2003 to non-Windows systems. Soon, Vintela will be releasing a product, with OpenWBEM at its core, that extends the reach of Microsoft Operations Manager (MOM) 2005 to the same Unix, Linux, and Mac systems.

Addressing the challenges outlined above, VMX is an example of implementing standards to extend the reach of a comprehensive single-platform management solution (namely Systems Management Server) to other platforms. Because of the native application of OpenWBEM, Unix, Linux, and Mac systems can use Systems Management Server for tasks like system discovery, software distribution, hardware inventory, file collection, software metering, and software inventory.

As lead developer of the OpenWBEM project, I take great pride in the fact that this open source project has crossed the chasm from pet project to commercially viable solution. It's a tribute to everyone working on the project and our relentless emphasis on quality, security, and stability. We began OpenWBEM a few years ago as a project focused on bringing a common management standard to the Linux world - it truly meets the vision of the DMTF for WBEM as a commercially viable solution.

Conclusion

The challenge of creating cross-platform management solutions becomes much more manageable when approached from the native level with accepted standards. The tools exist that allow anyone to apply WBEM as a management standard for heterogeneous enterprise networks. Many organizations have already streamlined management by implementing standards in-house, while others have been able to take advantage of commercial implementations of the same standards. True cross-platform management is no longer a dream - it's reality for those who are ready for it.

References

OpenWBEM: www.openwbem.org

Distributed Management Task Force: www.dmtf.org

Vintela: www.vintela.com

SNIA Storage Management Forum: www.snia.org/smi/home