Needed to set up a cluster where horsepower and cost were paramount, so
I thought this would be a good opportunity to try out Intel's business
class "vPro AMT" remote administration technology, and compare it to
IPMI, which I've used for years on servers. From a feature standpoint,
it seems quite impressive, going to far as using standards-based VNC!
Unfortunately, set up is quite a bear, with most of a day spent and
while I can remote power cycle the machine via a web interface, VNC
support is still not to be found. I have no intention of buying Windows
licenses for all these machines just so I can enable AMT. (the VNC
remote desktop solution)
So far, it would seem that the Intel approach is very Windows-oriented,
to the point where I've been unable to find any official documentation
at all as to how to make it work with *nix. After some googling and
trying to make sense of the "enterprise reference documentation" I
came
across http://blog.yarda.eu/2012/09/intel-amt-quickstart-guide.html
which apparently was working as recently as October of this year. (see
the comments)
However, it would seem that intel has pulled support for some of this,
as pages like
http://intel.com/wbem/wscim/1/ips-schema/1/IPS_KVMRedirectionSettingData
and
http://schemas.dmtf.org/wbem/wscim/1/cim-schema/2/CIM_KVMRedirectionSAP
simply resolve to 404, numerous attempts to google
"IPS_KVMRedirectionSettingData" and such haven't (so far) returned
anything useful.
From what it seems, Intel wants everybody to be installing PKI AMT
certificates on vPro motherboards via Windows.
Does anybody have any information that might be useful about how to
enable unencrypted VNC remote administration for CentOS based servers? I
have a used KVM switch, but that's always been a sub-optimum solution,
and it really makes a mess out of your server cages.