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Data Center Manageability Interface - Optimized for Data Center Servers

Simplify platform management implementations while enhancing robustness with the Data Center Management Interface (DCMI). The DCMI specifications are derived from Intelligent Platform Management Interface (IPMI) 2.0, which has been widely adopted by the computing industry for server management and system-health monitoring.

Both DCMI and IPMI help lower the overall costs of server management by enabling customers to save time, maximize IT resources, and potentially manage multi-vendor environments in the same way. DCMI provides the following benefits:

  • Highly compatible with existing server platforms and management infrastructure because of DCMI's compliance with the IPMI standard.
  • Optimized to cover the core interfaces and functions that are required by data center servers.
  • Streamlined approach enables hardware and software makers to more easily implement and use the management functionality.

The DCMI specifications define a uniform set of monitoring, control features and interfaces that target the common and fundamental hardware management needs of server systems that are used in large deployments within data centers, such as Internet Portal data centers. This includes capabilities such as secure power and reset control, temperature monitoring, event logging, and others.

The DCMI Reliability and Resilience Guidelines is an additional document that is used in conjunction with the DCMI specification. The document describes and outlines reliability and resilience targets for conformant platform management subsystems in DCMI Data Center Servers. It can be used as a checklist in describing OEM capabilities as requested by DCMI IPDC customers. In addition, the document can be used by IPDCs to create and negotiate the requirements for RFP's.

Specification and guideline information

Data Center Manageability Interface - DCMI Conformance Test Suite (DCTS)

The DCMI Conformance Test Suite (DCTS) provides a baseline set of tests for verifying compliance with the Data Center Management Interface (DCMI) specification. DCTS is designed to perform "Black Box" testing, wherein the focus is solely on the outputs generated in response to selected inputs and execution conditions. The primary objectives of the test suite are:

  1. Reduce ambiguity in the specification's interface description.
  2. Increase customer confidence in interoperability between different implementations.
  3. Identify which parts of the specification have been implemented.
  4. Help implementers and users understand how the DCMI interfaces are expected to be called.

Each test scenario tests a logical unit of functionality and reports PASS/FAIL or feature not supported.

Conformance test suite information

Data Center Manageability Interface - General Publications and Tools

This document explains the benefits of DCMI as well as presenting a usage model from an IPDC perspective. You can download this document in Adobe Acrobat format.

The DCMI Toolkit aids engineers in developing DCMI solutions.

The following publications and presentations were part of the Microsoft WinHec 2008 conference held in November 2008. You can download the documents in Adobe Acrobat format.

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