After spending too much time trying to get the formatting right on posting the announcement here, I’m going to back off and suggest you click on the image above to read about what’s new in COSMOS 1.1. In a nutshell, the SDD and SML components have stepped up to prime time to join the CMDBf tools and runtimes. Check it out and see what’s happening in the open source systems management universe!

David Whiteman, IBM
COSMOS Resource Modeling lead

You can type “COSMOS” in the Search inside this book box on the Amazon site to read the sections that show you what the authors think of the project’s contributions to CMDB implementation.

David Whiteman
IBM

One way to approach this integration challenge is in two steps.

1. Start with the basics by correlating resource identification information to know when repositories have data about the same resource.
2. Later you can implement pair wise mappings between models for properties that would be useful to integrate.

The Reconciliation Taxonomy (RTx) helps with the first of these steps. The RTx, sometimes known as a federation reconciliation catalog, is published by the Eclipse COSMOS project. It defines several resource types, known as facets in RTx, and widely used identification properties for each facet, that have a good probability of enabling automatic reconciliation of resource identities, and providing sufficient information for management tools and IT personnel to correctly locate/recognize each resource.

Management tools using the CMDB Federation (CMDBf) specification are one example of potential users. The CMDBf specification was originally published by a six-company consortium; the Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF) is carrying the work forward and has published two works in progress, the latest of which is accessible here.

The accompanying picture is an example of identity reconciliation using the RTx. Two management data repositories, MDR#1 and MDR#2, each have data about a computer, and each know a subset of the identifying properties contained in the RTx for computers. When each registers with a Federating CMDB the list of computers it knows, the CMDB inspects the identifying properties of each computer to determine if it already knows about this computer. Because both MDRs know the primary MAC address, the CMDB recognizes that each MDR has data about the same computer, so it creates only one object for the computer. Typically it would maintain links back to the data in each MDR. The CMDB could respond to queries by returning links to the data in each MDR and/or marshalling data from each MDR together (e.g., if it has done Step 2 and knows how to map at least some of the non-identifying properties) and returning a composite view.

Identity Reconciliation Example

Another potential use of the RTx is operational integration between management tools that use different data models. If each understands the RTx, one could ask the other to perform an operation on a resource by passing parameters for the RTx facet and its identifying properties. The receiver would analyze the parameters and, if it could resolve them to a known resource, perform the operation on that resource. A related use case is launch in context between management tools.

The RTx is described in one XML Schema Definition (XSD) file and one informative document. The informative document further describes the information in the XSD and provides examples of its use. The RTx intentionally started with only twenty seven resource facets and eighteen relationship facets. A motivation for publishing and developing it in COSMOS, at least initially, is to use a pragmatic experiential approach to select which types and identifying properties to include. It is expected that over time more types and more identifying properties for each type will be added as additional use cases are addressed. Looking down the road, a standards body may start to work in this area, possibly using the RTx as input.

Mark W. Johnson

IBM

COSMOS 1.1M1 is available now for download!

At a glance

COSMOS 1.1M1 provides the following new features and improvements:

• SDD support
  Tools and runtimes that provide support for the Solution Deployment Descriptor (SDD) standard on OASIS. SDD support was previously in research status, but is expected to be fully available in COSMOS 1.1. Included in M1:
  • A build time generator (BTG) that generates SDDs from many sources. The BTG will generate conformance level two SDDs.
  • A runtime driver is available, but still in development. With this driver, one can run the example COSMOS SDD through the runtime to install the COSMOS payload.
• SML support
  • Tools that support systems management data conforming to the Service Modeling Language (SML) and SML-Interchange Format (SML-IF) standards, version 1.1, including SML and SML-IF document validation, SML-IF editing, import of SML-IF documents and export to SML-IF documents. SML support was previously in research status, but is expected to be fully available in COSMOS 1.1. This driver includes numerous defect fixes.
• CMDBf 1.0 support and infrastructure
  • Integrated contextual help with MDR toolkit

  • Reconciliation taxonomy (soon to be renamed Federation and Resource Catalog)

For a list of features that were included with the COSMOS 1.0 release, please read the previous announcement.

COSMOS 1.1 is currently targeted for a June 2009 release.

Download

Download COSMOS 1.1M1 here.

As always, we welcome your participation and feedback via eclipse.technology.cosmos and cosmos-dev@eclipse.org, and also hope you will take the time to report bugs and feature requests via Bugzilla.

The COSMOS Team

CA has been a key contributor in building up the CMDBf tools provided by the COSMOS project. In addition to tools that help you build management data repositories (MDRs) and federating CMDBs, COSMOS provides data visualization tools that are specifically developed for administration of MDRs and registration of configuration items (CIs) such as hardware and software. COSMOS also now includes an initial implementation of a reconciliation taxonomy that can be used by a federating CMDB to resolve data coming from disparate sources.

David Whiteman
COSMOS Resource Modeling lead

Business Wire article

InformationWeek article

Post your comments - we’d love the feedback!

David Whiteman
COSMOS Resource Modeling lead

If you happen to be attending CA World in Las Vegas this week, please make a point to attend a session presented by COSMOS committer and Data Collection team lead Jimmy Mohsin. The session is titled Management Data Abstraction: An Overview of CA and Cosmos and runs 9:45-10:45 AM tomorrow. Here’s the scoop of what he’s planning to talk about, from the abstract:

This session will describe CA’s participation and contribution to Eclipse COSMOS 1.0. Additionally, a few key use cases involving COSMOS and CA products will be described.

If you go, make sure you ask him why we call him the Godfather of COSMOS.

This week will be the Management Developers Conference in Santa Clara, CA. Mark Johnson (IBM) and Dave Snelling (Fujitsu) will be doing a talk and demo featuring CMDB Federation (CMDBf). For those unfamiliar, CMDBf is “a standard for federating resource data in heterogeneous repositories” developed by a DMTF working group.

Note the following from the abstract:

This session will demonstrate federation of a number of management data repositories, each a different implementation, using the CMDB Federation specification. The federation will result in an aggregate view of the IT environment that is a union of the knowledge in the repositories, including reconciling together resource identities, and querying federated data in place in each repository. An open source sample implementation and tooling will also be shown.

The mystery open source implementation? Yep, that’s us.

If you are in the area on Wednesday at 10:40 AM and can attend the demo, please check it out!

COSMOS 1.0 provides support for the emerging Configuration Management Database federation (CMDBf) standard, based on the CMDBf 1.0b specification. Download COSMOS 1.0 and reap the benefits!

As always, we welcome your participation and feedback via the newsgroup, and also hope you will actively “kick the tires” to report bugs and feature requests via Bugzilla.

Thank you for all your interest and contributions thus far!

– The COSMOS Team

For the full text of the announcement, including some exciting components in research and development mode, click here. And no, this has nothing to do with Carl Sagan.