As a network administrator for a small local government agency, I have been tasked to deploy Intel's Active Management Technology (AMT) into our network environment. Having sold our IT management on the benefits of vPro technology and how it can revolutionize our system management capabilities, I am ready to move forward and get AMT installed . In addition, today I learned that we will begin receiving brand spanking new HP systems in January that will have the latest greatest vPro technology aboard. I've got a few months to become an AMT expert and be ready for the new systems. Life is good!

Where To Start

The first thing I did after learning about vPro and AMT was to visit the Intel vPro Expert Center web site. There I found a great variety of resources to help me with my deployment. This is a good site to get help and guidance. The only problem I have with the site is that there's no link to download the AMT docs or software. You'll want to get your hands on the Intel Active Management Technology Setup and Configuration Service (SCS) - Installation and User Manual. You can get this document as well as the software from http://softwarecommunity.intel.com/articles/eng/1025.htm. Since SCS is the foundation and support structure of everything that goes on in the AMT and vPro world, this was the most logical place to start.

In addition, since I plan on integrating SCS with my existing SMS 2003 infrastructure, I also downloaded the Intel Active Management Technology Add-on for Microsoft SMS 2003 - Installation and User's Guide. Getting this was a bit of a challenge so stay with me on this one. I had to navigate to another good link you'll want to keep and refer to, The Intel Management Developer Community. From here I searched for "SMS 2003" and found the link to the SMS 2003 Add-on document. For non-developers like me, this site can appear to be not exactly what we do everyday, but hang in there, this site has a lot of info too. Now I had the documents I needed. They created the basis on which I would start to plan and deploy AMT into my network.

Read, read, read

The first thing I did after printing the documents was to read them over several times so I could get the gist of just how all the pieces played together. Then I read them again. After the first pass, it all looked pretty daunting and difficult, but after reading many of the sections over, it all started to come together and make sense. Read. Read. Read.

Time to lay things out

Ok, now I had a pretty good idea of what everything did and why, it was time to make sure I had everything I needed to make the pieces work together. I began to try and lay out what I needed to have to make AMT work.

Servers - I need to decide where to install SCS. I had a recently rebuilt Windows 2003 R2 server available that also had SQL 2005 on it. Plenty of disk space and horsepower. This was good. We were using this server to host our Help Desk application and it didn't appear to be over taxed in any way. The hardware and base OS part was taken care of. The server happened to be in our central office which was also a benefit. Our office is put together in a spoke and wheel configuration with all outer offices connecting to the central office over fast network connections. This would be good when we start to provision systems from outer office locations.

Active Directory - SCS / AMT relies on and utilizes Active Directory quite a bit. Our Active Directory is at Windows 2003 R2 level so I'm good to go. Also, as a Domain Admin, I have the ability to make any changes necessary to Active Directory.

Security - AMT supports Transport Layer Security (TLS) for secure communications between AMT devices and management console applications. TLS is optional for AMT, however we wanted to make all our communications as secure as possible so we're going for a full TLS implementation. This requires certificates and fortunately we have a Microsoft Certificate Authority server in our network that will make things easy to manage.

Database - SCS stores all its information in a database. We're going to use the existing SQL 2005 database on the server we're going to install SCS on.

AMT Device Location - Where were the new systems coming into and who was handling them? In the past when new systems came in, our Help Desk techs were very efficient in imaging them and deploying them right out the door. I need to make sure that everyone in our Help Desk group was tuned into what we were trying to do. We'll need to have a meeting to discuss what's going to happen after they plug in a system to the network for the first time.

Now that I've gotten my infrastructure laid out, it's time to start installing software. Yeah!

Next time I'll detail the steps I took in actually installing SCS into my network. As always, any comments and suggestions are warmly welcomed.

Greetings from the trenches! My name is Sandy Wood and I'm a network administrator for the Orange County District Attorney's office in Southern California.

What I do

My primary job is to manage and support our fleet of 950 or so Windows workstations and 30 Windows servers. This covers everything from updating software, performance monitoring, alert management as well as second level Help Desk support.

The tools I use the most in my day to day activities are Microsoft SMS Server 2003 and Microsoft System Center Operations Manager 2007. These tools are indispensable in our daily jobs to keep our systems running smoothly and up to date.

vPro What?

Earlier this year, while attending a Microsoft Management conference, I stopped by the Intel booth and learned about vPro technology. Boy, what an eye opener for a management geek! This could really be system management nirvana! Since we were in the beginning stages of planning for the replacement our entire PC fleet, I called my boss and told him he had to make sure that our next systems had vPro technology. This was going to revolutionize the way we managed our systems from deployment to software updating to day-to-day support.

Why Should You Care?

Well, fast forward to today and we're just beginning to receive our first new systems. Brand, spanking new HP systems with, yes, you guessed it, Vpro with AMT 3.0! Everyone watched while we opened and unpacked the first system box. After my big vPro sales pitch, management was keen to see all the great new bells and whistles that vPro and AMT were sure to bring us. Before I go into just how cool it all worked and how cool I looked doing it, I thought it would be instructive to blog the actual steps (and missteps) I took in planning and deploying AMT in a real world situation, warts and all.

This is why you should care - if you're getting ready to deploy AMT or are just interested in the technology, this may (I hope) offer a glimpse into what it will take to get AMT rolling in your world. Reading the manuals is good and I highly recommend it however, nothing beats a real step by step walk through with real situations to give you a feel for the product and its potential.

What's Next?

The next step for me will be the planning phase. Although most of us love to just get out there and run setup, planning before you deply AMT in your environment will truly pay off for you. AMT has a lot of pieces and features that you're going to want to sit down and do a bit of thinking about before running setup. Trust me; you'll be glad you did.

Well, I'm finishing up my planning and will be back here soon with another installment of Life in the Trenches as I run down just what I did to plan for AMT deployment in my environment.

Stay tuned and as always, your comments and questions are welcome!

Short Version with Audio

FULL VERSION

If you would like to have more information on how we created the ISO image that copied the hal.dll file please let me know and I will post that information.

Or if you would like to see a certain feature shown how to use on the Intel System Defense Utility please let me know.

Over the last year I have worked with our internal IT shop to implement vPro & CentrinoPro into the environment. While that was fun & rewarding, I thought now would be a good time to implement a smaller instance w/ a mix of clients & try out the new Intel System Defense Utility that I put a link on the tool page..

I've currently procured a centrinoPro, vPro(AMT2.x) & working on obtaining a vPro(AMT3.0) box to showcase all use cases & functionality, especially the Remote Configuration feature. What is good to note is that Matt Royer already helped me demonstrate Remote Configuration in San Francisco IDF & it was very nice to watch the out of the box to having the console automatically provision & show the vPro machine. However now the immediate challenge is for me to set this up w/ ISDU & see what use cases I can utilize.

if your on this path as well, let me know. I like to hear how you are using AMT (active management technology).

Cheers. Off to Provisioning....

UPDATE

I updated the BIOS via USB on the CentrinoPro & vPRO machines to ensure latest bios. I will work to get the post up this week on how to create a dos bootable USB stick & the preferences on size of the stick.

I then downloaded the Intel System Defense Utility, then I hard lined the CentrinoPro machine for now as I have not changed my Access Point settings for WPA at this point

(remember i'm doing this in SMB mode).

I then started the scan & was able to see both machines. If you click on link below you will find that I was able to detect both machines. I started first with inventory to show what I could validate from the Machines. Good to note is that both machines are Plugged into the network & the power (desktop - of course, notebook - yes). I wasn't satisified with the results so I went to each of the machines Web UI to ensure I could connect.

Initial Scan to obtain machines on the subnet, while this took longer than I expected it did find all the machines.

After finding you double click on each PC & it connects you to the Firmware.

Then I pulled an asset mgmt screen on both the notebook & desktop to show that I can pull inventory, take in account each machine is powered down at this point.

Now to be sure you can establish communication I went to the Web UI on both, which in the ISDU tool it is simple to click the link & hit the admin login.

While this is good, it's time to now showcase the rest of the use cases, including System Defense with a few good filters. I was out hunting for a good virus & found the backdoor.darkmoon. One of the ports is listens on is 6868 & 7777.. I was able to use System Defense as seen below to block these ports by doing the following:

#1. Open up Intel System Defense Utility

#2. Connect to the impacted machine

#3. Select the "System Defense" tab

#4. Select "Block LImited Services"

#5. Uncheck all items & then in blocked ports in put "6868,7777"

#6. Hit Apply Settings, then Apply Changes

DONE - I've now protected my machine quickly against the potential exploit. It doesn't fix it for cleaning, however it does protect the virus from communicating & receiving future instruction.

Now I can remote control it, turn it on, update the DAT files.

Before the opening bell on the IDF showroom floor, Matt Wallington explains what the vPro challenge is all about. The question is who's the proest of pro's & ready to take on the challenge..