Thread-safe portable management interface

Abstract

A system and method for using a management interface such as Portable Management Interface (PMI) in a thread-safe and efficient manner. A secondary scheduler receives PMI management requests from multi-threaded manager applications in a thread-safe manner, such as through a lock. The secondary scheduler monitors the flow of PMI-related requests into PMI to ensure that, at any point in time, only one management request (e.g., callback function) is running on the PMI thread. When a request in the secondary queue is ready for scheduling with the primary scheduler, the secondary scheduler then accesses the primary scheduler in a thread-safe manner, such as through a lock, to send the request to the primary scheduler. The management requests are dispatched from the primary scheduler and executed on managed objects though a Management Information Server. The performance and efficiency of the manager applications is enhanced by increasing the responsiveness of interaction between the manager applications and the schedulers. The performance of the management interface is enhanced by eliminating the need for polling-based scheduling solutions.