Understanding Mof - Dell PowerVault ML6000 Reference Manual

After you have defined the NetworkDevice class, you can define a class for just switches. Since a switch
is a special type of NetworkDevice, you can use the object-oriented concept of inheritance to define your
Switch class. You can define the Switch class as a child of the NetworkDevice class, meaning that the
Switch class automatically has the properties and methods of its parent class. From there, you can add
properties and methods unique to a switch.
CIM defines a special type of class called an association class. An association class represents
relationships between two or more classes. For example, you can define an association class to show the
relationship between a NetworkDevice class and an OperatingSystem class. If there is a many-to-one
or many-to-many relationship, the association class is considered an aggregation.
UML draws a visual representation of the classes that describe a product or technology. UML contains many
visual elements, and only a subset of elements have been described here. For a full explanation of UML,
go to http://www.uml.org.

Understanding MOF

CIM is described in the DMTF's Managed Object Format (MOF), a language based on the Object
Management Group's Interface Definition Language (IDL). The MOF syntax describes object-oriented class
and instance definitions in textual form, with the goals of human readability and parsing by a compiler.
The main components of a MOF specification are:
• Textual descriptions of element qualifiers (meta-data about classes, properties, methods, etc.)
• Comments and compiler directives
• The specific class and instance definitions that convey the semantics of the CIM schema
These MOF files are an extension to the standard CIM schema version 2.9.
For information about the standard CIM schema version 2.9 MOF files, go to the DMTF website at the
following URL: http://www.dmtf.org. To view copies of the Dell Managed Object Format (MOF) file for the
ML6000 library, see MOF Files
Dell PowerVault ML6000 SMI-S Reference Guide
on page 17.
5