WS-Management (Web Services-Management) is a DMTF open standard defining a SOAP-based protocol for the management of servers, devices, applications and various Web services. WS-Management provides a common way for systems to access and exchange management information across the IT infrastructure.

Design

The specification is based on DMTF open standards and Internet standards for Web services. The specification is quite rich, supporting much more than get/set of simple variables, and in that it is closer to WBEM or Netconf than to SNMP. A mapping of the DMTF-originated Common Information Model into WS-Management was also defined.

History

WS-Management was originally developed by a coalition of vendors. The coalition started with AMD, Dell, Intel, Microsoft, Sun Microsystems and expanded to a total of 13 members before being subsumed by the DMTF in 2005. The DMTF has published the standards document DSP0226 with version 1.2 of September 30, 2014.

Implementations and application support