WBEM Through a firewall

[Sean Madden]

In a Windows Server Environment, instead of using SNMP through a firewall (to many ports open), is it possible to use WBEM (port 5989)? If so, is SSH also needed.

[David Claypool]

If you're working with a ProLiant running Windows, eliminating SNMP is not practical at this time. HP SIM expects to be able to gather data, status poll and receive events via SNMP.

First, Windows today uses WMI, not WBEM. While WMI is an implementation of a CIMOM, it differs in several ways. HP SIM uses a WMI Mapper to translate back and forth between "pure WBEM" to WMI. (In this case "pure WBEM" refers to Common Information Model data from the CIMv2 namespace encoded in XML and transported over secure HTTP. WMI uses the WMI namespace and transports over DCOM.)

WMI has not yet been instrumented for all of the features present in ProLiant servers and the WMI Mapper does not currently support WMI indications, the equivalent of SNMP traps.