WS-Management adopted as ISO/IEC international standard

DMTF (Distributed Management Task Force) announced today that the DMTF Web Services Management standard (WS-Man) version 1.1 has now been adopted by ISO (International Organization for Standardization) and IEC (International Electrotechnical Commission) as an international standard, ISO/IEC 17963:2013. This is a great milestone on the industry’s journey toward broad adoption of interoperable, royalty-free, standards-based solutions for management of systems, applications, and devices.

WS-Man is designed to address the cost and complexity of IT management by providing a common way for systems to access and exchange management information across the entire IT infrastructure. It is used as a network access protocol by many CIM (Common Information Model) based management solutions, including the DMTF’s CIM based DASH (Desktop and Mobile Architecture for Server Hardware) and SMASH(Systems Management Architecture for Server Hardware) solutions, as well as the DMTF’s Virtualization Management (VMAN) standards which we use to manage Windows Hyper-V. WS-Man is also the primary protocol for management of Windows Server 2012, and has been supported by all versions of Windows since XP (both client and server) through Windows Remote Management (WinRM). For more information about WS-Man and how it is supported in Windows Server, System Center, and PowerShell, see Jeffrey Snover’s blog post on the Windows Server blog.

Microsoft has a longstanding commitment to interoperability and standards in the management arena. In the early 1990s, Microsoft was one of the founding members of DMTF, and worked closely with industry partners on the development of CIM, a flexible standard that has been adopted for a wide variety of uses across computer systems, operating systems, networks, and storage devices. WS-Man and CIM are a powerful combination, with a rapidly growing ecosystem, and ISO/IEC adoption of WS-Man as an international standard will enable further adoption. Microsoft worked with the industry to standardize WS-Man CIM mappings for common management scenarios.

Microsoft also developed OMI (Open Management Infrastructure), a high-performance small-footprint implementation of a CIM+WS-Man server, released last year by The Open Group as an open-source project under the Apache 2 License. Written in portable C, OMI provides an enterprise-grade CIM and WS-Man implementation so that hardware and software vendors can focus their investments on providers and schemas within their domain expertise. OMI opens up management of hardware devices from any vendor in a datacenter using a “Datacenter Abstraction Layer” or DAL – enabling management of devices and servers that implement standard protocols and schemas from standards compliant tools like PowerShell.

Through those and related initiatives, we are continuing to help the industry deliver on the promise of standards-based solutions that address the cost and complexity of systems management. For example, DMTF also announced today that the DMTF Platform Management standard, which provides a common architecture for communication between management subsystem components, was adopted by ANSI (American National Standards Institute) and INCITS (International Committee for Information Technology Standards) as a US national standard, INCITS 495-2012 Platform Management. As DMTF VP of Technology Hemal Shah noted in today's announcement, “Adoption and recognition of the Platform Management and Web Services Management standards by these organizations provide additional credibility, while increasing the accessibility of these solutions to IT managers.”

These developments are further evidence of the global interest in interoperable, royalty-free, standards-based solutions to management of systems, applications, and devices. Congratulations to everyone who has worked to help achieve these important milestones!

Colleen Evans
Principal Program Manager
Microsoft Open Technologies, Inc.

Doug Mahugh
Lead Technical Evangelist
Microsoft Open Technologies, Inc.