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CIMDIFF: Advanced Difference Tracking Tool for CIM Compliant Devices

Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) for any enterprise scale data center is significantly dependent upon the effectiveness of the system management solutions and procedures deployed. Complexity of managing a data center increases as various enterprise applications demand diverse sets of requirements, leading to a very heterogeneous environment often fueled by diverse emerging technologies. Emergence of the industry standard Common Information Model (CIM) has introduced uniformity and interoperability into this complex managed environment. 
 
In this paper, we describe a tool CIMDIFF that provides syntactic and semantic difference tracking for CIM compliant devices in both spatial and temporal flavors. Since this problem is NP-hard, in this paper we present an efficient technique that combines domain specific object oriented knowledge with hierarchical structure of CIM-XML to derivemeaningful differences. We demonstrate the value of this tool for a) tracking difference in device characteristics b) verification of proper operation as well as automated validation of management software given the limited resources of testing infrastructure. An experimental evaluation of this tool in a complex data center is provided.