Fault-Tolerant Management Interface (FTMI)

Overview

IBM's Fault Tolerant Management Interface (FTMI) is an add-in component for their Director management package. This component is installed on a management console and uses the Windows Management Interface (WMI) to communicate with remote client machines.

WMI is Microsoft's implementation of the Common Information Model (CIM) which is a standard for instrumentation.

On the client there is a service called WinMgmt.exe - this is a Microsoft provided service that handles the WMI calls from the console. This service will pass the requests on to one of several service providers that will talk directly to hardware or other system software to get the data or change the system configuration. Microsoft has implemented several providers that can be used to get information about the system (normally called Win32 Providers).

Intel's FMTI DLL is a "plug-in" DLLs for the CMTGroup provider, which monitors and manages teams. This component utilizes Intel's Network Control Stack (NCS) to get and change the teaming information. NCS is supported only with  Windows 2000 and XP Professional operating systems.  

This component provides the following capabilities at the IBM Director console:

The FTMI component is installed automatically when Intel PROSet is installed, and only under the supported operating systems. 

NOTE: Functions that cause a configuration change (such as forcing a failover or an adapter offline) may not work if PROSet is also running on the client machine.  This is because the underlying software only allows one application to change the software at a time.

Software Requirements

The following are required for FTMI:

Director does not need to be pre-installed in order to install the FTMI component.


Last modified on 7/23/02 10:04a Revision 5