DNS on Windows Server 2003, 3rd Edition

WMI and the DNS Provider

The WMI API was developed by Microsoft in 1998 in response to developers’ and system administrators’ ever-growing need for a common, scriptable API to manage the components of the Windows operating systems. Before WMI, if you wanted to manage some component of the operating system, you had to resort to using one of the component-specific Win32 APIs, such as the Registry API or Event Log API. Each API typically had its own implementation quirks and required way too much work to do simple tasks. The other big problem with the Win32 APIs was that scripting languages, such as VBScript, could not access them. This limited how much an inexperienced programmer or system administrator could manage systems programmatically. WMI changes all this by providing a single API that can be used to query and manage the Event Log, the Registry, system processes, the file system, or almost any other operating system component.

WMI is the Microsoft implementation of the Common Information Model (CIM) developed by the Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF). The DMTF is an association of various hardware and software companies (e.g., Novell, Microsoft, Cisco, and HP) developing standards in enterprise management. As large enterprises have many computers with many software environments, managing these diverse environments can be a real challenge. In order to unify the management techniques for the sake of simplicity, DMTF defined CIM to represent real-world manageable entities ...