Integrating Configuration Manager 2012 R2 with Intel SCS 9.0 – Part 1 : Introduction

Lately I’ve been working on a project for a customer where they wanted to implement the out of band management feature, but the out of band management feature in Configuration Manager 2012 R2 only supports the following versions of AMT;

• Intel AMT version 3.2 with a minimum revision of 3.2.1
• Intel AMT version 4.0, version 4.1, and version 4.2
• Intel AMT version 5.0 and version 5.2 with a minimum revision of 5.2.10
• Intel AMT version 6.0 and version 6.1

More information about this here; http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/gg682077.aspx#BKMK_SupConfigOOB

The issue here is that all new computers comes with newer versions of AMT, and cannot be provisioned for out of band management by Configuration Manager 2012 R2.

So after some research I found that Intel SCS 9.0 can be integrated with Configuration Manager 2012 R2 for provisioning and then all management can be done from Configuration Manager 2012 R2. All features like Web Interface, KVM, Serial Over LAN (SOL), IDE Redirection (IDER), Power Commands and Integration with Wake-On-Lan are fully functional.

We’ve successfully implemented this and I thought I would share the experience throug this series of blog posts.

Why do we need the Add-on for Intel AMT?

Configuration Manager 2012 R2 includes built-in support for Out of Band (OOB) management of Intel AMT. This includes the capability to discover and configure Intel AMT, and then use some of the OOB features of Intel AMT. Some of these capabilities were implemented by Microsoft using the Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) interface of Intel AMT. The SOAP interface has been deprecated for some time, and was replaced with the Web Services Management (WS-Management) interface. From version 9.0 of Intel AMT, SOAP is no longer supported and any solutions that use that interface will not work.

The Add-on enables SCCM to be used with all supported versions of Intel AMT.

After installing the Add-on Intel AMT component, these built-in capabilities of SCCM are replaced by Intel SCS:

• Discovery of data from systems that support Intel AMT
• Configuration/Unconfiguration of Intel AMT on the discovered systems
• Maintenance of Intel AMT settings on the discovered systems

All operations related to any of these tasks will be handled by Intel SCS components using a Kerberos Administrator user, configured in Intel AMT. This means that all built-in menu options and settings windows in SCCM related to “provisioning” or configuration are no longer used.

In this release of the Add-on, only the built-in SCCM features that use Kerberos authentication are supported. All these features are located in the “Out of Band Management Console”, available when you right-click a configured Intel AMT system.

You can download the Intel Software used in this series of postings from the following locations;

Intel Setup and Configuration Software (Intel SCS) – https://downloadcenter.intel.com/Detail_Desc.aspx?agr=Y&DwnldID=20921&ProdId=3051&lang=eng
Intel SCS Add-on for Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager – https://downloadcenter.intel.com/Detail_Desc.aspx?DwnldID=24010
Intel Core vPro processor add-on for System Center Configuration Manager – https://downloadcenter.intel.com/Detail_Desc.aspx?agr=Y&DwnldID=21835