Dell Power Solutions

SYSTEMS MANAGEMENTUsing WMI Scriptingfor System AdministrationWindows Management Instrumentation (WMI), which offers administrators a richmanagement scripting tool set, is an integral part of the Microsoft Windows familyof operating systems—which includes Microsoft Windows 2000, Windows XP, andWindows Server 2003. This article introduces WMI, explains basic scriptingtechniques, and provides examples for automating systems management processesusing Dell OpenManage tools.BY SUDHIR SHETTYW indows® Management Instrumentation (WMI) is theunderlying management technology for Microsoft ®Windows operating systems. Based on industry standards,WMI helps enable consistent, uniform management controland monitoring of systems throughout an enterprise.WMI allows system administrators to query, change, andmonitor configuration settings on desktop and server systems,applications, networks, and other components ofthe IT infrastructure. System administrators can create awide range of systems management and monitoring scriptsthat work with WMI using the WMI scripting library.Overview of WMI architectureFigure 1 shows the three primary layers of the WMI architecture:WMI data providers, WMI management infrastructure,and WMI consumers.WMI data providersThe data providers retrieve information from managedresources. A managed resource is a logical or physicalcomponent that can be accessed and managed usingWMI. Examples of standard Windows resources that canbe managed using WMI include computer systems, disks,peripheral devices, event logs, files, folders, file systems,networking components, operating system subsystems,performance counters, printers, processes,registry settings, security, services, Microsoft ActiveDirectory ® directory service, Windows Installer, andWindows Driver Model device drivers. WMI data providersaccess the managed resources using the appropriateapplication programming interfaces (APIs) and exposethe data to the WMI infrastructure using a standardsbased,object-oriented data model.The operating system is bundled with standardproviders for accessing standard operating-systemresources such as processes, registry settings, and soforth. In addition, WMI enables software developersto add and integrate additional providers that exposedata and management functionality unique to theirproducts. For example, Dell provides a Common InformationModel (CIM) provider, which exposes additionalasset information through WMI. The Dell66POWER SOLUTIONS June 2004