Although Serial Over LAN (SOL) and IDE Redirect (IDER) are frequently used together, it is important to keep in mind that they are two separate vPro capabilities. IDER can work independently from SOL as long as no direct interaction is required. Similarly, SOL can allow you to interface with the client’s pre-boot environment and BIOS without the use of IDER. As you have noted, the SOL feature is restricted to terminal character displays only; once a graphical user interface is presented, you lose the ability to visually interact with it through the SOL terminal session.

The option you mentioned around crafting a fully automated and unattended boot images (Terminal or Graphical) works well for task orientated use cases. Scenarios such as out of host OS virus scans, hard drive reimaging, known task repairs (i.e. resolving static corruption caused by some wide spread malware), etc can be played out in an unattended fashion. If necessary, you could enable enough of a network stack within the unattended guest OS to send report outs of progress / status to a centralized locations or interface with the Manageability ISV (depending on the ISV’s capability) for additional instructions or steps. This type of process works well for broad based task or scenarios where you don’t want / need to interact with the session.

In the cases where you need to “troubleshoot” what is going on, the visual interaction plays a more important role and that is where SOL comes into play. Based on the restrictions of SOL, we are currently limited to using terminal / character based Operating Systems. Although at first glance you may see that as a big limitation, there are numerous tools for MS/PC DOS and Linux distributions that will allow you to perform diagnostics, troubleshooting, and maintenance. I personally use one that was built off Ubuntu that allows me to perform a variety of task ranging from mounting local partition (NTFS, FAT, ext, etc), mounting remote shares, general hardware dialogistic tools, etc. A somewhat simple example of how this may be used is to perform a SOL/IDER session on a vPro Client that has a corrupted OS. Once the guest OS is booted, mount the local disk, find & copy user data files to a remote share, and re-image the partition with the standard corporate image.

In those scenarios where a terminal interface for the guest OS just will not do, you can always use the IDER to boot the Guest OS and then connect using VNC or something equivalent to connect to the GUI remotely over the network. In the MS Windows world, you could use Windows PE and then connect remotely via Remote Desktop; for Linux, start your x session and use VNC.
The examples above predominately focus on using a Guest OS to boot off of. In those cases where you want to see what is exactly happening on the Host OS, SOL will typically not work since most Host Operating Systems are running some form of Graphical Interface. If the host OS is up, you would still use the in band remote management tool (i.e. remote desktop, ISV agents) to establish connectivity and perform your troubleshooting. The challenge still remains when you want to interact directly with the Host OS and the Host OS network stack is inaccessible or the in band remote management tools are failing.

In terms of your question around using vPro to remotely reimage a Windows PC… There are a couple ways to do it depending on what tools you have available to you. One approach would be to create an IDER boot image that gets the vPro client on the network. From there you would boot the vPro client off the IDER image and either do a Windows unattended install over the network using an answer file or perform a partition restore using a product like Norton Ghost. Depending on the partition imaging product, they may already have a network boot disk that handles all the network stacks and remote re-imaging; technically all you should have to do there is point the IDER image to that boot disk.