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 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 data or change 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 component for the CMTGroup provider, which monitors and manages teams. This component utilizes Intel's Network Configuration Services (NCS) to get and change the teaming information. NCS is supported only with newer Microsoft Windows operating systems, such as 2000, XP Professional, and Windows Server 2003.  

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 1/23/03 8:38a Revision 8