What Are DMTF Standards?

DMTF standards are a family of open specifications developed by the Distributed Management Task Force for managing servers, storage, networks, and cloud infrastructure in enterprise and data center environments. The portfolio defines both information models that describe the structure and properties of managed resources and communication protocols that carry management operations between software agents and hardware. DMTF standards are designed to be vendor-neutral, enabling management tools from different vendors to interoperate across heterogeneous IT environments without requiring proprietary interfaces.

The DMTF standards portfolio has evolved since the organization's founding in 1992, expanding from its original focus on desktop system management into server hardware, virtualization, and cloud orchestration. The standards are developed through working groups whose output is reviewed and published as formal DMTF specifications. Implementations appear in server firmware, operating system management stacks, cloud platforms, and storage arrays from major IT vendors worldwide.

CIM Schema and Information Modeling

The Common Information Model (CIM) schema is the information modeling foundation underlying most DMTF management standards. CIM uses a structured, object-oriented schema organized into three layers: a core schema covering concepts common to all managed environments, a common schema adding domain-specific classes for computing systems, networks, devices, and applications, and an extension schema where vendors can add product-specific properties. The metamodel defines the syntax and semantics for creating conformant class definitions, including properties, methods, associations, and qualifiers. The CIM specification and schema at DMTF provides the authoritative schema files and accompanying documentation. CIM is implemented in Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI) on Windows systems and in various open-source CIM repositories on Linux systems, making it the most widely deployed management information model in enterprise computing.

WBEM and WS-Management Protocols

The Web-Based Enterprise Management (WBEM) protocol suite provides the transport layer for CIM-structured management information. WBEM's primary encoding uses CIM-XML, which packages CIM operations such as instance enumeration, property retrieval, and method invocation in XML documents transported over HTTPS. WS-Management, DMTF specification DSP0226, adapts the same CIM model for transport over SOAP, making management traffic compatible with web service infrastructure including firewalls and proxy servers. The WBEM standard documentation at DMTF describes the component specifications and their version history. Both WBEM and WS-Management are implemented in systems management software including Microsoft System Center, HP Systems Insight Manager, and the OpenLMI project for Linux.

Redfish Scalable Platforms Management API

Redfish is DMTF's modern out-of-band management standard, published as specification DSP0266. It replaces the Intelligent Platform Management Interface (IPMI) with a REST-based API that uses JSON-encoded data and OData metadata to represent and access server hardware state. Redfish defines resources for systems, chassis, managers, network adapters, storage, power, and thermal components, with a hypermedia-driven navigation model that allows clients to discover available resources without prior knowledge of the hardware topology. The Redfish standard at DMTF covers the core specification documents alongside conformance test suites and schema bundles. Redfish has been adopted by all major server manufacturers including Dell, HPE, Lenovo, and Supermicro, and is mandated by the Open Compute Project for data center hardware.

Applications

DMTF standards have applications across a wide range of enterprise and cloud computing infrastructure domains, including:

• Data center server lifecycle management using Redfish firmware interfaces for provisioning and monitoring
• Virtualization platform management through CIM extensions for hypervisors and virtual machines
• Enterprise IT service management and configuration management database population using WBEM
• Cloud orchestration platforms requiring vendor-neutral resource discovery and inventory
• Storage system management using CIM profiles developed in coordination with SNIA