In Vista, a lot of instrumentation, configuration, and utilization information is exposed via WS-Man. Vista WS-Man (aka: WS-Management, Windows Remote Management, and WinRM) incorporates many features, but I like to think of it as the management protocol...

WS-Man (Windows Remote Management) is a new protocol and framework first delivered in Windows 2003 R2 and is more prevalent in Windows Vista and beyond. There's an easy way to test WS-Man reachability that is similar to the network ping concept by...