Description: Limited technical support hours and powered down PCs can make it difficult to manage large numbers of PCs. Randy Nystrom, an IT systems engineer at Intel, explains how vPro makes it easy to diagnose and manage desktops from a central location.
The content for this video was sponsored and provided by Intel.
Randy Nystrom: Hello!
My name is Randy Nystrom. I'm a systems engineer in IT at Intel Corporation,
and I'm here today to talk to you about vPro and manageability. I support PC based
training rooms across all of Intel. I currently manage 77 training rooms across
30 different sites with over a thousand machines.
And today, I'd like to talk to you about the challenges that I have. At the end
of the day, PCs are always powered off, so I'm unable to do any remote
installations of software or operating systems. Standard support hours are
eight a.m. to five p.m. So, that limits us to the time available to go ahead
and do any of the OS or software installations because a PC power requires a
technician to go out there.
Getting into the hardware diagnostics with the PCs in a powered off state,
you're unable to do any of the diagnostics or any of the asset management. So,
what vPro and manageability means to me, it means that I can essentially manage
my training room environment from a single console, and I can get to that via
either a web interface or from a secured interface, which is your SCS.
The SCS is your Set up and Configuration Service. It allows us to connect up to
the active management technology, which is a separate computer from your OS.
So, we're not limited to the machine's OS, which gives us our out of band
management capabilities, meaning that, if there's no OS, we can still manage
the machine via the active management technology.
So, one of the features that this brings in is our serial over LAN. With a
serial over LAN, what that does for us is we can turn from the console, send a
request to the active management technology and this in turn will allow us to
see the display as a machine boots up.
This text mode allows us to watch the bios boot up. We can actually determine
if there's any errors during the bios boot up and gives us some good in depth
hardware diagnostics. If we have to do any OS installs, we can turn around and
we can do the IDER, which is an IDE Redirector. And that's your CD Rom or a
floppy. And we can send a request to the machine via AMT to redirect the CD Rom
to go out to a network shared images, pull the image down and then deploy this
image to where it puts an OS onto this machine. And this is all done from a
central console.
For more information about vPro and manageability, you can go out to Intel
Premiere IT Professionals website and get all of this information.
Premier Vendor Content Whitepapers, webcasts & resources from our Power Center Sponsors
- Marc Canter: The master of multimedia speaks
-
In this Super Techies interview, larger-than-life techie Marc Canter talks with ZDNet's Editor in Chief Dan Farber about his career as a multimedia pioneer.
- Watch the video >>
- Access the latest Intel and industry best practices
-
Designed specifically to address the concerns of senior IT managers at organizations with more than 100 employees, the Intel Premier IT Professional Program provides best practices via local and e-Seminars and a members-only Web site.
- View the Intel Premier IT Professional web-site tour >>
