Hardware Configuration Options; System Health Events - HP xw4300 Technical White Paper

Hardware Configuration Options

One of the most compelling features of HP CMI is the power to manipulate and change hardware
configuration options in an open and adaptable manner. WMI provides a foundation for scriptable
administration of operating system options that is well proven in the enterprise management
community. HP CMI leverages that foundation to provide the IT administrator with an unprecedented
degree of control in managing configurations across the enterprise. As with sensor information, the
mechanisms provided for collecting and manipulating hardware configuration options are designed
with forward compatibility and future capabilities in mind.
The following table illustrates the inherent capability and flexibility of HP CMI in dealing with various
types of hardware configuration options.
Management Class
HP_BIOSSetting
HP_BIOSString
HP_BIOSInteger
HP_BIOSEnumeration
HP_BIOSOrderedList
HP_BIOSPassword
HP_BIOSSettingInterface

System Health Events

Traditionally, system health monitoring has required a management agent to poll hardware features
at some deterministic frequency in order to discover possible warning and error conditions within the
system. This polling model of health measurement requires system resources and, potentially, network
resources to monitor and maintain. In addition, the longer the polling interval, the longer it takes to
potentially discover the triggering event. HP CMI breaks this mold of system health notification by
surfacing events directly from the hardware when they are discovered. Management applications
designed to consume WMI events can be configured to subscribe to the events generated by HP CMI
without impacting system performance or network bandwidth.
The following table outlines some of the event monitoring capabilities provided by HP CMI. Like all HP
CMI features, new events can be introduced with new hardware platforms or through system firmware
updates without impacting the design of the interface or management tools designed to consume the
events.
Description
Defines the basic set of properties common to all forms of BIOS
settings. All hardware configuration options supported by the platform
can be surfaced by enumerating this class.
Extension of HP_BIOSSetting to support string-based hardware
configuration options. This would include such capabilities as:
ownership tag, asset tracking number, and UUID.
Extension of HP_BIOSSetting to support numeric hardware
configuration options.
Most hardware configuration options fall into an enumeration category.
Enumerations are collections of possible values for a setting (usually
expressed as human-readable text). Example enumerations would be:
"On, Off" or "Enable, Disable".
This class extends the HP_BIOSSetting to support such hardware
features as boot order.
While password values are never exposed through the HP CMI model,
this class exists to help determine the existence of various password
options on the client platform. This class would be queried to determine
if a setup password was currently set on the platform, for example.
This class provides access to the WMI methods exposed by HP CMI.
This includes methods to set individual settings and reset all settings to
a default state.
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