The Configuration Management Database Federation (CMDBf) specification has recently been standardized by the Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF) through a multi-vendor effort. The co-authors, in alphabetical order, were BMC, CA, Fujitsu, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, and Oracle. The CMDBf provides a standard way for management repositories to share management data with each other using a federated model.

Repositories play one or both of two roles: a Management Data Repository (MDR) that makes data available for federation and a Federating CMDB that federates data from MDRs. In the CMDBf specification, two services are defined: one implemented by Federating CMDBs and used by MDRs to register data available for federation and one implemented by both Federating CMDBs and MDRs to query data from a repository. Federation is an alternative to importing large amounts of data from an MDR into a CMDB. Instead the data is accessed only on demand. This yields a rich picture of the enterprise management data while avoiding the scalability and data quality issues that can result when enterprise quantities of data is replicated between different repositories.

The CMDBf Technology Preview is an implementation of these two services on top of IBM Tivoli Change and Configuration Management Database (CCMDB) 7.1.2.

How does it work?

An MDR can call the registration service to notify the CCMDB of resource instances available for federation. The CCMDB merges this information into its database and maintains links to the MDR's CMDBf query service. In addition, a CCMDB remote client program can formulate CMDBf-compliant queries and issue them to the CCMDB implementation and receive CMDBf-formatted data in return.

Jacob Eisinger is a software engineer on the Emerging Standards team in IBM Software Group. In 2007, he started participating in the CMDBf.org workgroup and continued participating on the standardization effort at DMTF. Jacob has expertise in Web services, XML, and Java.