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Standard CIs

A Standard CI is an abstracted configuration for a CI family that you can use for baseline comparisons to "real" CI instances in the same family. A Standard CI can be a real CI in the sense that it represents a physical object or it can exist only for comparison purposes. Standard CIs can have the following associations:

• A Standard CI can be shared among several CIs.
• A CI can only have a single Standard CI associated with it at any given time. When the Standard CI is changed, that change is reflected in any comparison between any of the associated CIs and the Standard CI.
• A family can have multiple Standard CIs. For example, one family might have standard CIs named “Standard Test Server,” “Standard Production Server,” “Standard Acceptance Server.” We recommend that you name Standard CIs in such a way that they can be easily searched for and identified as Standard CIs.

Because a Standard CI is itself a CI, it can be managed. It has an audit trail, security, a history of changes, and so on, just like any other CI. After a Standard CI has been defined for a particular CI, you can use it to verify compliance with corporate standards.

The concept of “date” or “time” does not apply to when comparing a Standard CI with a snapshot or milestone. Only the Standard CI attribute values are used for comparison purposes, snapshots and milestones specific to the Standard CI do not apply.

Example: Standard CI Use

A company defines an Employee Workstation configuration as a Standard CI to compare with its actual desktop computers in the Hardware.Workstation family. A comparison reveals that a specific computer has only 1 GB of RAM, instead of the Standard CI memory value of 2 GB.