Out of Band Manager Scalability Q&A for SCS 1.2

Recent erroneous reports regarding scalability of Altiris Out of Band Manager have occurred. The following Q&A was developed with Intel input and approval and corrects this misinformation. This document is intended to be used reactively if you encounter this misinformation.

Problem statement:

Altiris® Out of Band Management Solution 6.1 (OOBM) only supports up to 100 clients, is not scalable, and therefore not an enterprise solution.

Correct Statement

Altiris™ Out of Band Management Solution 6.1 (OOBM) is fully scalable and provides critical enterprise solutions support including out of band desktop provisioning, alert response and resolution and secure power management. Altiris OOBM should be used with Intel® AMT Setup and Configuration Service (SCS) 1.3 revision to avoid scalability limitations inherent in earlier firmware versions.

Background:

We encountered scalability issues when using Altiris™ Out of Band Management Solution 6.1 (OOBM) with Intel® AMT Setup and Configuration Service (SCS) 1.2. Scalability was limited to hundreds of machines rather than the expected thousands of machines limiting its applicability for enterprise solutions. The scalability was erroneously attributed to the Altiris OOBM solution; Intel discovered a bug in Intel® AMT SCS 1.2 and has created a hot fix for inclusion in Intel® AMT SCS 1.3 and newer versions.

Q1. Is Intel's SCS only for small and medium businesses (SMB)?

Intel® AMT Setup and Configuration Service (SCS) is a tool intended for Enterprise environments. Intel® AMT SCS 1.2 included some stability issues causing limitations in manageability software scalability. SCS version 1.3 includes fixes for these bugs and these fixes have been tested with tools including Altiris Out of Band Manager 6.1 and Altiris Console 6.5.

Q2. What was the source of the supposed scalability limitation?

Issues in the Intel® SCS component caused the AMTConfig service to crash or hang only under certain circumstances. A more in-depth explanation is provided in the Intel SCS component 1.3 Hot Fix (KB article 35954).

Q3. What is the status of the Hot Fix?

Intel developed a hot fix "Altiris® Out of Band Management Solution 6.1.1" for this issue and has released it as production level code. This hot fix can be obtained at the Altiris Solution Center.
LINK: https://kb.altiris.com/article.asp?article=35954&p...

Q4. What are the current limitations of SCS?

Intel® AMT SCS 3.0 has a list of bugs and limitations listed in its release documentation. The Intel® AMT SCS team continues working on fixing these non-critical bugs after each major release. Altiris is encouraged to always take the latest SCS release before releasing their management console software. The Intel® AMT SCS team is also working on continuous improvements and enhancements of the Intel® AMT SCS to make it more scalable and usable and continuously working on enhancing the stress testing capabilities.