There is simply no bigger pickle than the one you find yourself in when your computer receives a boot error. Whether it's because your ntldr file is missing or your boot.ini is corrupted, boot errors are quite the serious annoyance within the IT world. Imagine one of your clients recieves a boot error and is unable to access the Operating System, what are you supposed to do? Sure, you could waste the time to walk over to wherever the system is located and manually repair the problem, but what if your client system is not even at the same site that you're working at? Well there's an easy fix with vPro AMT technology and that's known as Remote Diagnostics Remote Repair, more commonly called the "Spare Tire ISO fix". The Spare Tire ISO essentially allows you to send an image of the missing or corrupted boot file down the wire to temporarily boot the OS, thereby allowing you to use simple tools such as mapping a network drive to replace your malovent file. More importantly, all of this is easily executable in literally little to no time at all. In this short video, I'll show you how to utilize the Spare Tire ISO through a SMB perspective using System Center Essentials and the AMT Management Pack.

To find out more about the Spare Tire Fix and how to actually CREATE this particular ISO from scratch, make sure to check out this resource.

Here are the key use cases supported by MS SCE (Microsoft System Center Essentials). Each of the use cases below will reference a certain page in the Manageability Pack located @ http://softwarecommunity.intel.com/isn/downloads/Manageability/Intel_AMT_MP_Guide.pdf. Therefore I highly recommend you download the PDF and then cross reference the list below.

System Discovery

Discovery allows the Management Pack to locate Intel® AMT systems. During the discovery process, the Management Pack retrieves asset information from the Intel® AMT subsystem. Discovery needs to be performed before you can perform any other Intel® AMT-related tasks.

For details on the different ways to perform discovery, see “Discovering Systems” on page 87.

Viewing Asset Information

You can view information about the Intel® AMT system’s hardware assets (CPU, memory, and more).

For details on viewing asset information, see “Retrieving Asset Identification Information” on page 97.Intel® AMT Management Pack for Ops Manager and Essentials • Installation and User’s Guide 6

Power Control Operations

Power control operations enable you to remotely control the power states of Intel® AMT-supported systems.

You can apply the following power control operations to Intel® AMT systems:

•power-up

•power-down

•power cycle

•reset

You can specify the way that a system should boot, depending on the specific system implementation.

For details on power control operations, see “Power Control Operations” on page 101.

SOL/IDE Redirection Operations

The SOL/IDE Redirection feature enables you to remotely perform the following redirection operations on Intel® AMT-supported systems:

•Serial Over LAN (SOL): Allows you to display the non-graphic boot screens of an Intel® AMT machine, thereby allowing you to modify BIOS entries or to change the way that the system boots.

•IDE Redirection (IDER): Allows you to boot the Intel® AMT machine from a boot image located elsewhere on the network.

For details on redirection operations, see “Redirection Operations” on page 109.

System Defense

The System Defense feature allows you to define multiple system defense policies and apply them individually to a system.

For details on the System Defense feature, see “System Defense” on page 121.Chapter 1 • Introduction7

Event Handling

You can configure Intel® AMT systems to send PET (Platform Event Trap) events to multiple event collectors, and view these events in Ops Mgr/Essentials. For information on the PET protocol, refer to the ASF specification at http://www.dmtf.org/standards/asf/.

For details on registering for PET events, see “Registering and Unregistering for PET Events” on page 137.

For details on monitoring PET events, see “Monitoring Alerts (PET Events)” on page 157.

Looking ahead to the next post..

the plan is to showcase each use case in quick video's and post out.. stay tuned for more..

Josh H

I was asked recently which consoles are available for Small / Medium buisness, therefore I talked with my peers in the SMB space to pulse them for the info below.. here’s what they said..

Intel tools are designed only to demonstrate AMT functionality and do not include all of the features one would need to manage a network.

The 2 main SW packages for companies 200-1000 that have Intel vPro Technology built in are:

SyAM http://syamsoftware.com/main/index.php

Microsoft SCE: http://www.microsoft.com/systemcenter/essentials/default.mspx?pr=blog

For over 1000:

LANDesk http://www.landesk.com/

Altiris http://www.altiris.com/

Microsoft SCCM http://www.microsoft.com/systemcenter/configurationmanager/en/us/default.aspx

So.. the next question is what do you do with the infrastructure that is less than 200? This is what I’m going after to figure out and post. Also to note is that we just finished building our first SCE server in my lab and we’re managing a few machines and it looks pretty good, of course I’ve yet to try automation & other tasks, currently just testing the OOB capability and the functionality for vPro. Nicole on my team is going to blog about this more. Things I wish I knew BEFORE I installed SCE (System Center Essentials) As for SyAM I saw this installed at an End Users site right before the summer and looked like a lot of the DTK functionality integrated in, however I’m still working to get it installed on a console to test/break, etc..

So.. next journey, finish out the use cases on the MS System Center Essentials console with Nicole and then start-up our SyAM testing with a 1/2 dozen boxes. If you want to see something specific or discuss a certain area please let us know as we dig deeper into SMB setup's.

Blog on! Erick Simpson has posted a three part series up on the vPro Expert Center about how we can minimize the effect that our economic situation is having on service revenue. See the links to these insightful blogs below.

Erick is a co-founder and CIO of MSP University in Southern California, and directs the creation and development of corporate business relationships and represents the organization at key Industry Events and Conferences. Erick is a recognized Managed Services Author, Speaker and Trainer, and contributor to numerous industry publications and events. You can find out more about MSP university at http://www.mspu.us.

2008, The Economy and minimizing its impact on Service Revenue with vPro

2008, The Economy and minimizing its impact on Service Revenue with vPro Part 2

2008, The Economy and minimizing its impact on Service Revenue with vPro Part 3