Intel® vPro™ technology and manageability

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.