CIM agent is a Common Information Model (CIM) agent provides a means by which a device can be managed by common building blocks rather than proprietary software. If a device is CIM-compliant, software that is also CIM-compliant can manage the device.

Vendor applications can benefit from adopting the common information model because they can manage CIM-compliant devices in a common way, rather than using device-specific programming interfaces. Using CIM, you can perform tasks in a consistent manner across devices and vendor applications.

IBM Tivoli FlashCopy Manager communicates with the DS8000 storage using VDS (more on VDS in later chapters) in order to initiate the FlashCopy process. In DS8000 enviornment, VDS will require a CIM Agent in order to be able to communicate with an IBM DS8000 Storage. IBM DS8000 provides the option of installing the CIM agent on the host or on the storage hardware management console (HMC). This section will focus on the installation & configuration of the DS8000 CIM.

Note. 1: one CIM agent can handle multiple hosts, so you don’t have to install CIM Agent on every SQL host that you need to protect using IBM Tivoli FlashCopy Manager.

Note. 2: Although you can have a mix of CIM Agents running on HMC & Hosts in your environment, it will be a good idea to stick with one of them to unify your configuration.

Note.3: Software CIM Agent uses the following default ports to communicate with the DS8000 storage: 5989 for https communication & 5988 for http communication. You will have to make sure the Software CIM agent host can communicate to the storage & other hosts that will be sharing the Software CIM agent on these ports in order for it to function.

Note.4: The HMC CIM agent must use secure connections over port 6989. You will have to ensure a communication using this port between the HMC CIM agent and hosts to be protected is allowed.

Note.5: Optionally you can enable the DSCLI between the protected host (DSCLI uses port 1750) & the DS8000 if you required running some DSCLI scripts on the host. This might be a security risk & you should consult your security team & IBM Partner in this regard.

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