Integrating Configuration Manager 2012 R2 with Intel SCS 9.0 – Part 8 : Out of Band Management Options

If you’ve followed the previous parts in this series, you’ll now have one or more clients provisioned for Out of Band Management in Configuration Manager, in this last part I will go through and show the features that this will provide you with.

Ping
When we configured the AMT Profile in Part 4, we left the option “Enable Intel AMT to respond to ping requests” enabled. This means that the machine will respond to ping request even when powered off, so how can we identify if a system is powered on or off with ping? If you look at the screen shots below you’ll see that PC001 have a TTL=128 when powered on and TTL=255 when powered off.

We also enabled all the management interfaces when we configured the AMT Profile in Part 4;

Web UI
This will enable a Web UI on all your clients provisioned on port 16993, your reach this Web UI on https://fqdn:16993

You will then be presented with the Log On page, here you can log in with one of the users present in the SCCM 2012 R2 AMT Administrators group created in Part 2 of this series.

If you are not able to logon (will fail after 3 attempts) and you are sure that you type the correct username and password, take a look at KB908209. After reading this you’ll see that you need to add the following setting to Registry on the machine you’re trying to access the Web UI from; (Below is for 64-Bit, check KB for 32-Bit computers)

1. Start Registry Editor.
2. In the left pane, locate and then click the following registry subkey:
   HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\WOW6432Node\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Main\FeatureControl
3. On the Edit menu, point to New, and then click Key.
4. Type FEATURE_INCLUDE_PORT_IN_SPN_KB908209, and then press ENTER.
5. On the Edit menu, point to New, and then click DWORD Value.
6. Type iexplore.exe, and then press ENTER.
7. On the Edit menu, click Modify.
8. Type 1 in the Value data box, and then click OK.
9. Exit Registry Editor.

You don’t have to install the hotfix, just add the registry setting.

After you’ve logged on you’ll be able to see the following information via the Web UI

Serial Over LAN (SOL)

The SOL feature only lets you see the boot process and BIOS remotely (Text only), if you will remote control inside Windows and wants full GUI use the KVM feature described later)

To use the SOL feature you need to start the Out of Band Management Console (Right click computer in Configuration Manager Console -> Manage Out of Band -> Out of Band Management Console)

IDE Redirection (IDER)

IDE-Redirect is a very helpful feature of Intel AMT. With this feature an administrator can reboot the machine on to a redirected disk or a CD ROM Drive. You can control this from the  Out of Band Management Console also.

In the example in the screen shots below I use it to remote boot the machine into WinPE from a redirected ISO on my Configuration Manager server.

If you use large ISO’s with IDER, make sure you take a look at this post to speed things up; Speeding up Intel AMT IDE-Redirection with a 2-stage boot process

Power Commands

If you right click computer in Configuration Manager Console -> Manage Out of Band -> Power Control you’ll be able to Power On, Power Off and Restart Computer. Be aware that the Power Off is a hard Power Off, but from version 9.0 of Intel AMT support for Graceful Shutdown is added.

KVM

In Part 1 I’ve posted the link to Intel Core vPro processor add-on for System Center Configuration Manager if you install this on the system that is running the Configuration Manager Console it will add the ability to start a KVM session and set an Alarm Clock for your computers. These features are added as right-click tools, see screenshot below

The Alarm Clock will let you specify a time that you want to wake your computer if it’s turned off;

When you start a KVM session the first thing that will happen is that a user consent is required. (This is because we do host based configuration/provisioning of AMT, if you want to bypass this you’ll need to set up the RCS component of Intel SCS. I’ll post a series on this later). This consent consists of 6 digits that needs to be typed in before you can connect, once typed in you have full control of the remote system and have a full GUI. The session will remain active until terminated and also survives reboots, so you can reboot a remote system and go into BIOS etc.

With this this series of integrating Configuration Manager 2012 R2 and Intel SCS 9.0 comes to an end. I hope it’s been helpfull and if you have any questions or comments please let me know, thank you.

Previous Postings in this series:

Integrating Configuration Manager 2012 R2 with Intel SCS 9.0 – Part 1 : Introduction
Integrating Configuration Manager 2012 R2 with Intel SCS 9.0 – Part 2 : Active Directory
Integrating Configuration Manager 2012 R2 with Intel SCS 9.0 – Part 3 : Certification Authority
Integrating Configuration Manager 2012 R2 with Intel SCS 9.0 – Part 4 : Configuration Profiles for Intel AMT
Integrating Configuration Manager 2012 R2 with Intel SCS 9.0 – Part 5 : Configuring SCCM 2012 R2
Integrating Configuration Manager 2012 R2 with Intel SCS 9.0 – Part 6 : Installing Intel SCS Add-on
Integrating Configuration Manager 2012 R2 with Intel SCS 9.0 – Part 7 : Deploying Intel AMT