Chapter 19. Management objects: WMI and WS-MAN
This chapter covers:
A horse is a horse, of course, of course. And no one can talk to a horse, of course. That is, of course, unless the horse is the famous Mister Ed!
Theme song from the Mister Ed television show
In the previous chapter, we explored the kinds of things you can do with COM, the Windows “native” object framework. Although COM and .NET can be used for many management tasks, management isn’t their primary purpose. In this chapter we’ll look at an object system that’s specifically designed to address the needs of systems management: Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI). WMI is Microsoft’s implementation of the industry-standard Common Information Model (CIM).
In this chapter, you’ll learn what WMI is, how to access it from PowerShell, and what you can do with WMI once you have this access. You’ll work through a number of examples to see how things work, exploring the sorts of tasks that can be accomplished. The second part of the chapter looks at Web Services for Management (WS-Man). WS-Man is another standard related to CIM. We introduced WS-Man in chapter 13 in the context of PowerShell remoting, but in this chapter, you’ll see how to use it to access the CIM objects and why that matters.