Subject: FW: A question for the group...clarification

From: "Al Bergstein" <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 28 Jan 2001 15:27:22 -0800

And re-reading this, I see that someone might think that I was
describing WMI as (WBEM implementation on Windows). Of course, WMI
stands for Windows Management Instrumentation. Also, Sun has done work
on WBEM, not WMI. I tend to use the two terms, WMI and WBEM
interchangeably when describing the concept, but understand that it
isn't entirely accurate. Just trying to be more precise.

Al

-----Original Message-----
From: Al Bergstein 
Sent: Sunday, January 28, 2001 3:17 PM
To: [email-masked]
Subject: A question for the group...

Somehow I remember seeing something on this, but can't find it in the
archives (maybe I'm not looking hard enough).  I haven't seen anyone
post
from MS,so I assume we are not engaged in this effort, though I'm
somewhat
surprised that we don't appear to be. I'll ask on our behalf.

My question: 

While I have followed this discussion over the last months, and believe
you
have done good work on this, I'm interested in the group's thoughts on
WMI
and how it might relate to your emerging standard. I totally understand
the
thoughts that went into  support for the SMI protocol, given that it is
the
most widely used method for surfacing events today. I'm also sure that
many
of you have at least known about Microsoft's work around WMI (for WBEM
implementation on Windows) and the Sun's use of the DMTF's WBEM . What
I'm
curious about is your thoughts on where  the future intersection of your
work and WBEM come together. 

Quick background: Microsoft has currently instrumented a great deal of
Windows 2000 with WMI. More work is continuing in the next release of
Windows, along with many of our application groups who are  doing
additional
work using WMI. In addition, we have demonstrated interop with Sun as
far
back as fall of 1999, if I remember right. 

Sun has done some work on Solaris 8 with WMI. I assume more will follow.

Is the assumption of the group that, since "hardware" based vendors (I
use
that term here loosely, so be gentle - :) are not yet using WMI, that
the
group will do this work now with a "revision" to the proposed standard
at
some time down the road, if it starts to happen? Or that WMI based
management environments will somehow consume the XML messages into their
management consoles,and that issue will be figured out later by this
group
or by companies like ours in the forums like the DMTF?

I would assume that the DMTF would want to be working on this also,
since on
their web site (http://www.dmtf.org/spec/wbem.html) they state: 
The CIM specification is the language and methodology for describing
management data. The CIM schema includes models for Systems,
Applications,
Networks (LAN) and Devices. 

Hope this is question is clear. I'm more than willing to take feedback
offline, if you feel that it's too off base for this discussion group.

Sincerely, 

Al Bergstein
Technical Evangelist
Data Center 
Microsoft Corporation

The views expressed here are entirely my own, and somewhat represent
Microsoft's...(G)