Systems Management Protocols

DMI

The Desktop Management Interface (DMI) gives component vendors a uniform, nonproprietary method of making their products manageable. It was designed to allow systems management capability on systems without support for SNMP. It does not require the compilation of MIBs, but does use a little more network bandwidth than SNMP. It has been more widely used for client systems (desktop PCs and notebooks) and is much less common on servers.

The DMI is a layer of software that serves as an intermediary between desktop-resident management programs and the manageable hardware and software desktop components. DMI architecture defines a set of components that a DMI management software application can use to retrieve or change the attributes of a managed node.

Four primary components form the high-level architecture of DMI:

• Service layer
• Management information format (MIF) database
• Management interface (MI)
• Component interface (CI)

If provided by the vendor, component agents perform much like the SNMP management agents except that they store the inventory/configuration, fault, security, and performance information in the MIF database.

The CI enables the hardware and software desktop components to provide information to management programs. The MI enables desktop resident management programs to read and write the management information. A component's MIF file specifies what information can be extracted from the component.

Component agents are required for the monitoring of dynamic information, such as sectors read from and written to a hard drive, or impending and actual failure notifications. Access to purely static configuration data, such as amount of memory installed, manufacturer and model of computer, etc., can be enabled solely through the MIF file.

DMI remote procedure calls (RPCs) are connection-based, guaranteeing delivery and relying on the underlying network transport protocol.