Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF, formerly "Desktop Management Task Force") is an industry consortium that develops and maintains standards for systems management of IT environments. These standards allow building systems management infrastructure components in a platform-independent and technology-neutral way. These standards guarantee systems management interoperability between IT products of different suppliers without costly transformations and adaptations.
The DMTF was founded in 1992. It is an open consortium where companies, organisations and single persons can become members. In 2005, the DMTF had more than 3500 participants out of more than 200 companies or organisations. The DMTF is organized in working groups where the participants jointly develop and maintain the standards. The DMTF has alliances with a number of other consortiums and with the academia.
DMTF standards include:
- Common Information Model (CIM) - The CIM Schema is a conceptual schema that defines how the managed elements in an IT environment (for instance Computers or Storage Area Networks) are represented as a common set of objects and relationships between them. CIM is extensible in order to allow product specific extensions to the common definition of these managed elements. CIM uses a model based upon UML to define the CIM Schema. CIM is the basis for most of the other DMTF standards.
- Web Based Enterprise Management (WBEM) - Defines protocols for the interaction between systems management infrastructure components implementing CIM, a concept of management profiles that allows defining the behavior of the elements defined in the CIM Schema, and other specifications needed for the interoperability of CIM infrastructure.
- Systems Management Architecture for Server Hardware (SMASH) - Defines a command line protocol for interacting with CIM infrastructure, and management profiles for server hardware management.
- System Management BIOS (SMBIOS) - Defines how the BIOS interface of x86 architecture systems is represented in CIM (and DMI).
- Alert Standard Format (ASF) - Defines remote control and alerting interfaces for OS-absent environments (for instance a system board controller of a PC).
- Directory Enabled Network (DEN) - defines how LDAP directories can be used to access CIM managed elements, and defines CIM to LDAP mappings for a part of the CIM schema.
- Desktop Management Interface (DMI) - DMI was the first desktop management standard. Due to the rapid advancement of DMTF technologies, such as CIM, the DMTF defined an "End of Life" process for DMI, which ended March 31, 2005.
CIM is also developed outside of the DMTF. Two examples are:
- The SNIA develops and maintains the SMI-S standard that defines DMTF management profiles for Storage Area Networks.
- The The Open Group develops and maintains the CMPI standard that defines a C/C++ API for CIM providers.