Microsoft System Center Essentials - vPro Use Cases Supported

jhilliker — Tue, 09 Sep 2008 21:00:00 GMT

Here are the key use cases supported by MS SCE (Microsoft System Center Essentials). Each of the use cases below will reference a certain page in the Manageability Pack located @ http://softwarecommunity.intel.com/isn/downloads/Manageability/Intel_AMT_MP_Guide.pdf. Therefore I highly recommend you download the PDF and then cross reference the list below.

System Discovery
Discovery allows the Management Pack to locate Intel® AMT systems. During the discovery process, the Management Pack retrieves asset information from the Intel® AMT subsystem. Discovery needs to be performed before you can perform any other Intel® AMT-related tasks.
For details on the different ways to perform discovery, see “Discovering Systems” on page 87.

Viewing Asset Information
You can view information about the Intel® AMT system’s hardware assets (CPU, memory, and more).
For details on viewing asset information, see “Retrieving Asset Identification Information” on page 97.Intel® AMT Management Pack for Ops Manager and Essentials • Installation and User’s Guide 6

Power Control Operations
Power control operations enable you to remotely control the power states of Intel® AMT-supported systems.
You can apply the following power control operations to Intel® AMT systems:
•power-up
•power-down
•power cycle
•reset
You can specify the way that a system should boot, depending on the specific system implementation.
For details on power control operations, see “Power Control Operations” on page 101.

SOL/IDE Redirection Operations
The SOL/IDE Redirection feature enables you to remotely perform the following redirection operations on Intel® AMT-supported systems:
•Serial Over LAN (SOL): Allows you to display the non-graphic boot screens of an Intel® AMT machine, thereby allowing you to modify BIOS entries or to change the way that the system boots.
•IDE Redirection (IDER): Allows you to boot the Intel® AMT machine from a boot image located elsewhere on the network.
For details on redirection operations, see “Redirection Operations” on page 109.

System Defense
The System Defense feature allows you to define multiple system defense policies and apply them individually to a system.
For details on the System Defense feature, see “System Defense” on page 121.Chapter 1 • Introduction7

Event Handling
You can configure Intel® AMT systems to send PET (Platform Event Trap) events to multiple event collectors, and view these events in Ops Mgr/Essentials. For information on the PET protocol, refer to the ASF specification at http://www.dmtf.org/standards/asf/.
For details on registering for PET events, see “Registering and Unregistering for PET Events” on page 137.
For details on monitoring PET events, see “Monitoring Alerts (PET Events)” on page 157.

Looking ahead to the next post..
the plan is to showcase each use case in quick video's and post out.. stay tuned for more..

Josh H

Log Viewer for SCCM Logs.

jhilliker — Fri, 04 Jul 2008 06:11:00 GMT

Over the last couple of weeks my co-worker Craig Pierce and I have been working on SCCM sp1 rc1 and rc2. A tip that we learned for looking at the AMT logs and watching them update real time was to use the trace32.exe tool. craig discusses this more in his post @ http://communities.intel.com/message/4343 . I can't tell you how helpful this was as we were provisioning, unprovisioning and using the Inband OOB import tool. The log also showed us the UUID which was important if you are trying to validate that it is indeed the right box sending hello packets.

Here's a couple links for more information:

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc180193(TechNet.10).aspx

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sms/bb676787.aspx

Get the toolkit here: http://download.microsoft.com/download/b/0/c/b0c4b64b-d7e6-47a0-9779-376c09f4a081/SMS2003Toolkit2.exe

I will be posting more of my experience with SCCM SP1 and different OEM hardware over the coming weeks.

Josh Hilliker at myitforum.com

Microsoft System Center Essentials - vPro Use Cases Supported

Log Viewer for SCCM Logs.