Deployment Scenarios of Intel® vPro™, Part 1: Deployment Scenarios Introduction

The articles in this series assume the reader is familiar with the core provisioning, enabling, and configuration of Intel® vPro™ within an Altiris Out-of-Band Management. The topics covered here are advanced deployment situations such as:

• Multiple client facing Altiris Notification Servers
• Mixed environments of Altiris and other client management consoles
• Migration of Intel® vPro™ configurations and deployments to an Altiris environment

The ideas and models presented in this series are a mix of proven deployments, known facts, and theoretically possible solutions either setup in the lab or discussed. The material is provided "as-is" for your own reference, testing, and deployment considerations.

With the Altiris Out-of-Band Management environment using Intel® SCS for the provisioning and configuration, this series will focus both on homogeneous and heterogeneous situations. It will also provide some insights for environments where the Intel® vPro™ technology was configured by a third party setup or configuration application for the Intel® Active Management Technology within Intel® vPro™.

A variety of reference materials were used in putting together this series. Some core reference documents, articles, and discussions that may be of interest include:

• Intel® SCS website with user guide
• Options and core criteria for provisioning Intel® vPro™
• Post-Deployment Series
• Series on using Altiris Out-of-Band Management in a multiple Notification Server environment
• Series on troubleshooting Altiris Manageability Tooklit
• Discussion on managing Intel® vPro™ client that were already provisioned

The series is expected to provide:

• Introduction to the deployment models being discussed
• Greater insight on the security and configuration considerations
• Additional insight on the Intel® Setup and Configuration Service (SCS)

In reviewing varies deployment models and configurations within an Altiris environment, a few key reminders will be emphasized through the series:

• Once an Intel® vPro™ system is configured, proper authentication and authorization is needed to access the management engine.
• Core tables in Altiris CMDB in reference to provisioning Intel® vPro™ include Inv_OOB_Capability, Inv_AeX_AC_Location, and Inv_AeX_AC_Identification.
• The provisioning service and related provisioning events are very dependent on correct DNS mappings. Dynamic DNS updates of the client FQDN are important to appropriately resolve the IP address. If configurations are changing frequently for testing purposes, or additional troubleshooting is needed, utilize the /flushdns and /registerDNS options of the Microsoft Windows ipconfig command. Use /flushdns to clear both the management server and client DNS cache. Use /registerDNS to ensure the Intel® vPro™ client is registered in DNS.

Summary

The foundational rules have been established once the core Intel® vPro™ provisioning events for an Altiris environment are understand. Continue reading through the series to explore additional insights and understanding which will assist in enterprise deployments requiring more than just the standard configuration.

The opinions expressed on this site are mine alone and do not necessarily reflect the opinions or strategies of Intel Corporation or its worldwide subsidiaries