AMT drivers

Overview

AMT (Active Management Technology) drivers extend Ironic’s range to the desktop. AMT/vPro is widely used in desktops to remotely control their power, similar to IPMI in servers.

AMT drivers use WS-MAN protocol to interact with AMT clients. They work on AMT 7.0/8.0/9.0. AMT 7.0 was released in 2010, so AMT drivers should work on most PCs with vPro.

The staging-amt hardware type uses AMT for power and boot device management.

Set up your environment

A detailed reference is available in Intel Active Management Technology.

A short guide follows below:

  • Set up AMT Client

    • Choose a system which supports Intel AMT / vPro. Desktop and laptop systems that support this can often be identified by looking at the “Intel” tag for the word vPro.
    • During boot, press Ctrl+P to enter Intel MEBx management.
    • Reset password – default is admin. The new password must contain at least one upper case letter, one lower case letter, one digit and one special character, and be at least eight characters.
    • Go to Intel AMT Configuration:
      • Enable all features under SOL/IDER/KVM section
      • Select User Consent and choose None (No password is needed)
      • Select Network Setup section and set IP
      • Activate Network Access
    • MEBx Exit
    • Restart and enable PXE boot in bios

  • Install openwsman on servers where ironic-conductor is running:

  • Enable the staging-amt hardware type, power, deploy and management interfaces, for example:

    [DEFAULT]
enabled_hardware_types = staging-amt,ipmi
enabled_deploy_interfaces = direct
enabled_management_interfaces = staging-amt,ipmitool
enabled_power_interfaces = staging-amt,ipmitool

    and restart the ironic-conductor process:

    service ironic-conductor restart

  • Enroll an AMT node

  • Specify these driver_info properties for the node: amt_password,

    amt_address, and amt_username

  • Boot an instance

Note

It is recommended that nodes using the pxe_amt* driver be deployed with the local boot option. This is because the AMT firmware currently has no support for setting a persistent boot device. Nodes deployed without the local boot option could fail to boot if they are restarted outside of Ironic’s control (I.E. rebooted by a local user) because the node will not attempt to PXE / network boot the kernel, using local boot solves this known issue.