In beteo’s projects, HP´s Universal CMDB is often used as configuration management database in the context of Application Lifecycle Management projects. I had the opportunity to get more general uCMDB knowledge at a HP training course in Helsinki. CMDBs (Configuration Management Databases) are used more and more consistently in enterprises in order to map and survey the increasingly complex system landscapes. uCMDB (Universal CMDB) is the name for HP´s CMDB implementation, which clearly focuses on the capability of mapping large business environments. The training was a five-day course held at Oracle´s Training Center. The participants came from Finland, Poland, England and Switzerland.
The course started with a survey about how to use a CMDB. Step-by-step, we were led through almost all menus of uCMDB. The basic element of a CMDB is the so-called CI (Configuration Item), which describes the properties of any hardware, software as well as business process. Each CI is an instance of a CIT (Configuration Item Type), comparable to an object in object-oriented programming.
The most important modules of uCMDB are the automatic search function enabling the search for system landscape changes by means of discovery, the impact analysis and the distributed storage of the CMDB via a centralized administration, the so-called Federated data model.
Basically, uCMDB is able to store all kinds of properties of all kinds of systems. In combination with HP Business Availability Center (HP BAC), uCMDB allows a monitoring system to be implemented. The training course clearly demonstrated the power of the uCMDB, in spite and because of its actually simple structure.
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