Patent ID: 7937716

Claim:
A management protocol system to manage opaque entities in a computing environment comprising: a processor; an events component that is configured on the processor, when executed, to enable a manager to utilize a received event communicated by a corresponding managed entity of a plurality of managed entities, to indicate when administration or other management actions have occurred to domain information on said corresponding managed entity; and a commands component that is configured, when executed, to interact with select ones of said plurality of managed entities in response to said events component receiving corresponding events there from so that said manager can manage said plurality of managed entities as opaque entities, said commands component having: a backup command to back up said domain information stored by said managed entities as opaque configuration objects; a restore command to restore said domain information to said managed entities as opaque configuration objects; and a query command to query, an identified one of said plurality of managed entities to determine whether two domain configurations are semantically different in a way that allows the configurations to remain opaque to said manager; wherein a service level domain is defined as a type of domain information that characterizes configuration information specific to an entity to be managed, and said commands component further comprises an operation to version changes to managed entities that: requests a copy of a current service level domain from a particular managed entity in response to receiving an event there from indicating that a potential service level domain change has occurred; retrieves a previously stored service level domain corresponding to said particular managed entity; transmits said stored service level domain to said particular managed entity; receives a message from said particular managed entity indicating results of a comparison of said current service level domain and said stored service level domain; and stores version information including said copy of said current service level domain based upon results of the comparison indicated in said message from said particular managed entity.