For those of you out there that are using the SMS Addon the following might be of interest, if seeing close to 100% success rates is your thing...
If you've been using the SMS Addon together with Microsoft SMS as your vPro enabled management console of choice then you might have experienced less than 100% success rates when you're trying to perform AMT operations on collections of machines. The following details I will be providing have been devised specifically in the context of using the AMT wake-up feature for a Power Management Use Case, however you can extrapolate the essence and apply elsewhere if you're using some of the other features in the SMS Addon...
Ok enough of an introduction.
If you're implementing the power management use case, then before you'll be using the AMT wake-up feature, you'll be putting machines to sleep according to a certain policy you've put together (user initiated, SMS job executed shutdown.exe or some other shutdown scripts). However, you want to be sure that the machines you have put to sleep can be woken up on demand - mandatory advertisement triggered wake-up, scheduled wake-up or console initiated wake-up. Finding out you can't wake some machines up that you've put to sleep is far from being ideal - effectively you're reducing the success rate of your use case and you're putting machines in a state where you're benefiting from power savings, but you've compromised on your ability to get access to that machine from remote.
What might interest you then is a deterministic way to ensure that every machine you put to sleep as part of your power management use case, you can wake up. Well... we've done just that.
Here is the trick - you create your SMS collection for machines that you want to put to sleep and then wake-up, with a simple SQL statement of:
' Select * where iAMTStatus = 1' - the key here is this field iAMTStatus = 1 which is a return value that confirms the SMS Addon can communicate successfully with the vPro machine. Therefore you now have a deterministic way of knowing that a machine that you've put to sleep can be woken up using SMS Addon and the AMT wake-up feature.
An improvement on that is to run an AMT discovery daily (or some other frequency) to dynamically update the collection based on the ability of the SMS Addon to get to machines successfully. This will cater for if there are any changes in your environment, which there might or might not be. Currently the only way to run an AMT Discovery repeatedly on machines that have already been discovered in the past is to manually right click on a collection in the SMS Console and select AMT Discovery. We might have a more automated way of doing this soon... so watch this space.
Hopefully you find this useful.
- a caveat/disclaimer I should perhaps mention is that his method does not mean you will have 100% success rate for ALL your machines. Undoubtedly you will have some machines that do not have iAMTStatus = 1. Effectively what you're doing here is defining the scope.