Common Information Model (computing)
| Status | Published |
|---|---|
| Year started | 1999 |
| Organization | Distributed Management Task Force |
| Related standards | WBEM and SMASH |
| Domain | Information model |
| Abbreviation | CIM |
| Website | www |
The Common Information Model (CIM) is an open standard that defines how managed elements in an IT environment are represented as a common set of objects and relationships between them. The Distributed Management Task Force maintains the CIM to allow consistent management of these managed elements, independent of their manufacturer or provider.
One way to describe CIM is to say that it allows multiple parties to exchange management information about these managed elements. However, this falls short in expressing that CIM not only represents these managed elements and the management information, but also provides means to actively control and manage these elements. By using a common model of information, management software can be written once and work with many implementations of the common model without complex and costly conversion operations or loss of information.
The CIM standard is defined and published by the Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF). A related standard is Web-Based Enterprise Management (WBEM, also defined by DMTF) which defines a particular implementation of CIM, including protocols for discovering and accessing such CIM implementations.
The CIM standard includes the CIM Infrastructure Specification and the CIM Schema:
CIM is the basis for most of the other DMTF standards (e.g. WBEM or SMASH). It is also the basis for the SMI-S standard for storage management.
Updates to the CIM Schema are published regularly.
Many vendors provide implementations of CIM in various forms:
There is also a growing tools market around CIM.
CIM-XML is a protocol for sending CIM messages on top of HTTP. It has two message types:
CIM-XML forms part of the WBEM protocol family, and is standardised by the DMTF.
...
Wikipedia