Multiple Device Manager (MDM) adds discovery of IBM storage devices to the IBM Director discovery services. MDM discovers both storage devices that comply with the Storage Management Initiative Specification (SMI-S) and SAN devices such as switches, ports, and hosts. SMIS-compliant storage devices are discovered using the Service Location Protocol (SLP).
The MDM server software performs SLP discovery on the network. The User Agent looks for all registered services with a service type of service:wbem. MDM performs the following discovery tasks:
The storage devices, once discovered, are displayed in the Group Contents pane of the IBM Director. Device characteristics are displayed when you double-click on the icon for the storage device.
MDM discovery can be invoked by the following methods:
MDM can also access storage devices through the CIM Agent software. Each CIM Agent can control one or more storage devices. The CIM Agent consists of three components, which include a Web-based interface for the configuration of the associated storage devices, a CIM object manager (CIMOM), which provides a CIM-based API for the hardware and configuration information for the storage devices. After the CIMOM services have been discovered through SLP, MDM contacts each of the CIMOMs directly to retrieve the list of storage devices controlled by each CIMOM. MDM gathers the vital characteristics of each of these devices.
For MDM to successfully communicate with the CIMOMs, the following conditions must be met: