A CIM (Common Information Model) Based Management Model for Clouds

The recently emerged Cloud Computing paradigm poses new management challenges because of its complex, heterogeneous infrastructure. A cloud contains infrastructure (Servers, Storage, Networks), applications (web apps, database, backup etc.) from various vendors. Generally, different vendor products are managed (discovery, provisioning, monitoring etc.) by their own proprietary management software. Today, in clouds there is no standard way to manage infrastructure and applications using a single management framework. This will cause cloud management a complex task and creates interoperability issues. The Cloud infrastructure cannot be easily replaced due to dependency on the management software. In this paper we will present various independent CIM (Common Information Model) based Management models available as today, their applicability to cloud infrastructure, advantages etc.