Openwsman relies on a CIMOM as the back end for providing system information. Openwsman currently uses the SBLIM CIM client library which connects to major CIMOMs supporting cimxml or connects using a local interface to the SFC Broker.

While there is an added communication overhead using this library, the main purpose of the intial release of Openwsman is to implement the WS-Management specification. Later, better integration with CIMOMs is planned.

To get started, install a CIMOM with cimxml support and make sure it does support HTTP. For the authentication, make sure you follow one of the scnarios:

• Allow anonymous connections (usefull only for testing), this way you can use either BASIC or DIGEST with openwsman.
• Enable PAM authentication if Openwsman is also configured it. This way, both Openwsman and the CIMOM will use PAM.
• Use the same BASIC password file for both the CIMOM and Openwsman. Once the CIMOM is up and running, make sure you can access the classes using a WBEM client (e.g. wbemcli from the SBLIM project or the python client from OMC). If the classes are accessible then you are ready to use openwsman with the CIMOM.

Because Openwsman can be used by multiple vendors, the configuration file provides a way to define the vendor specific namespaces and how they corrospond to the CIM classes provided in the CIMOM. See the section about the configuration file for more details.