PowerShell community,
We are pleased to announce availability of OMI - a highly portable, small footprint, high performance CIM Object Manager. OMI stands for Open Management Infrastructure, and it is available from Open Group as an open source project.
See this Windows Server blog post for full details. http://blogs.technet.com/b/windowsserver/archive/2012/06/28/open-management-infrastructure.aspx
OMI opens up management of hardware devices in a datacenter using what we call a "Datacenter Abstraction Layer" or DAL. Imagine configuring a set of hardware devices from different vendors (like network switches) using a set of PowerShell cmdlets - that's what DAL would bring to you. Basically, any device or server that implements standard protocol and schema can be managed from standard compliant tools like PowerShell. A big blocker for IHVs to adopt was availability of a portable and high performance CIM+WsMan server that they can easily port to their devices. This gap has been filled by OMI.
This is cool and we are so excited about it. Jeffrey Snover did a technology demonstration at TechEd Europe in which he used PowerShell to manage a base-motherboard controller on a server, a Windows operating system, and an Arista switch running OMI. You can see recording of this session here (look at 51:15 mark)
Osama Sajid , Program Manager
Standards Based Management Team