The Distributed Management Task Force has announced the formation of a Server Management Working Group, to further develop the DMTF standards...
This particular effort looks quite redundant with both DCML and the Microsoft SDM effort. It's always fascinating to watch such ferment; I'm almost tempted to start a betting pool on which effort will win out. (Probably the DMTF; DCML doesn't have the vendor participation and their reported direction to use RDF is probably suicidal. And Microsoft doesn't have the interoperability story.)
I've been spending more and more time with the DMTF's work and continue to believe that some very high quality thought has gone into these standards. The frustrating thing is that the DMTF continues to use a non-standard UML to describe their information models, which have deep inheritance hierarchies and other typical metamodel issues.
They have even gone so far as to define their own XML encoding. It's quite baffling why they aren't simply using a standard MOF-compliant UML, which would allow them to leverage XMI.
Another interesting DMTF announcement is that they are partnering with NIST (U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology.) NIST is also a Platform member of the OMG, so perhaps some alignment will be driven here. Folks, let's just have one formalism at this level, please?
As I've noted before, the "over the wall" divide between development and operations is a notoriously dysfunctional internal boundary in information technology. Without reconciliation to the OMG's Model Driven Architecture, the operations-centric standards (DCML, SDM, DMTF) run the risk of perpetuating this division. Developers will model systems and deployments in UML, and then some sort of "over the wall" transformation will have to take place to represent this information on the operations side.
Why continue with such an impedance mismatch? On the other hand, integrating DMTF/DCML/SDM with MDA would be truly powerful, allowing for seamless transitions of components and their associated metadata throughout the systems development/deployment lifecycle, and a completely integrated, ERP-like view of the IT capability.
I call it "Model Driven Configuration Management."
