Your Library, Smi-S, And Cim; Understanding Cim; Wbem Initiative; Unified Modeling Language - Dell PowerVault ML6000 Reference Manual

Your Library, SMI-S, and CIM

A CIM server is embedded within the ML6000 library. The CIM server is SMI-S compliant and contains a
Server profile and several subprofiles. For details about these profiles, refer to
on page 7.

Understanding CIM

CIM is an object-oriented information model that describes management information in a network or
enterprise environment. Because it is object-oriented, CIM provides abstraction, inheritance, and
dependency or association relationships between objects within the model. CIM is based on XML and is
platform-independent and technology neutral. Therefore, management application developers do not need
to understand how CIM was implemented on a vendor product. Only the API is required to interact with a
vendor product.
CIM uses a client/server model. The CIM server can either be embedded into the vendor product (as it is
with your library) or it can be implemented by a proxy server that provides the CIM server functionality for
the legacy vendor product. The CIM client is the management application that communicates with one or
more CIM servers to manage the SAN. The CIM client discovers CIM servers through Service Location
Protocol (SLP) version 2, as defined in RFC 2608. SLPv2 uses UDP port 427 for communication and is a
discovery protocol that is separate from the CIM client/server communication path.

WBEM Initiative

The WBEM initiative is a set of management and Internet standards developed to unify the management of
enterprise computing environments. The WBEM initiative includes the following:
• CIM, which provides a common format, language, and methodology for collecting and describing
management data.
• The CIM-XML Encoding Specification, a standards-based method for exchanging CIM information.
CIM-XML uses an xmlCIM encoded payload and HTTP as the transport mechanism. CIM-XML
consists of the following specifications:
• The xmlCIM encoding, a standard way to represent CIM information in XML format.
• CIM Operations over HTTP, a transportation method that describes how to pass xmlCIM
encoded messages over HTTP.
For more information about the WBEM initiative, go to the DMTF website at http://www.dmtf.org.

Unified Modeling Language

SMI-S relies on object-oriented classes as defined in CIM. These classes are frequently defined using
Unified Modeling Language (UML). To understand SMI-S and the Dell extensions present in this document,
you must have a basic understanding of CIM classes and UML.
A class is a collection of properties and methods that define a type of object. For example, a generic network
device is a type of object. To describe this object, you could define the NetworkDevice class. You could
then define this NetworkDevice class with the properties or attributes of a network device, such as
IpAddress and DeviceType. You can also control your network device through the NetworkDevice
class by adding methods or routines that can trigger specific actions on your network device. Example
methods are enablePort() and rebootDevice().
4
CIM Profiles and Subprofiles
Understanding SMI-S, CIM, and MOF