Updates on Microsoft Oslo and “SSH on Windows”

I’ve been tracking the modeling technology previously known as “Microsoft Oslo” with a sympathetic eye for the almost three years since it’s been introduced. I look at it from the perspective of model-driven IT management but the news hadn’t been good on that front lately (except for Douglas Purdy’s encouraging hint).

The prospects got even bleaker today, at least according to the usually-well-informed Mary Jo Foley, who writes: “Multiple contacts of mine are telling me that Microsoft has decided to shelve Quadrant and ‘refocus’ M.” Is “M” the end of the SDM/SML/M model-driven management approach at Microsoft? Or is the “refocus” a hint that M is returning “home” to address IT management use cases? Time (or Doug) will tell…

While we’re talking about Microsoft and IT automation, I have one piece of free advice for the Microsofties: people *really* want to SSH into Windows servers. Here’s how I know. This blog rarely talks about Microsoft but over the course of two successive weekends over a year ago I toyed with ways to remotely manage Windows machines using publicly documented protocols. In effect, showing what to send on the wire (from Linux or any platform) to leverage the SOAP-based management capabilities in recent versions of Windows. To my surprise, these posts (1, 2, 3) still draw a disproportionate amount of traffic. And whenever I look at my httpd logs, I can count on seeing search engine queries related to “windows native ssh” or similar keywords.

If heterogeneous Cloud is something Microsoft cares about they need to better leverage the potential of the PowerShell Remoting Protocol. They can release open-source Python, Java and Ruby client-side libraries. Alternatively, they can drastically simplify the protocol, rather than its current “binary over SOAP” (you read this right) incarnation. Because the poor Kridek who is looking for the “WSDL for WinRM / Remote Powershell” is in for a nasty surprise if he finds it and thinks he’ll get a ready-to-use stub out of it.

That being said, a brave developer willing to suck it up and create such a Python/Ruby/Java library would probably make some people very grateful.