topic Re: SCCM Serial Connection in Intel vPro® Platform

SCCM Serial Connection

BMull — Tue, 25 Jan 2011 05:26:31 GMT

Hi There,

I am curious to find out if anybody is using the serial connection in out of band in a production environment.

I have it implemented however I find it a bit heavy when displaying information.

For example, when I start the Serial Connection and boot into BIOS I can see it however when I try to boot of a PXE I can't see anything but a cursor.

Has anybody experienced this and know how to improve it?

I wanted my techs to be able to re-image workstations remotely via this technology

Any help would be great,

Regards,

Blair Muller

Re: SCCM Serial Connection

idata — Tue, 25 Jan 2011 16:36:12 GMT

Blair, I'm not using it in production, but I have been able to successfully install operating systems over SOL, but I used the remote iso launcher (RISL.) However, can't you just deploy images directly out of SCCM, or is the issue that it needs to be OOB? I'm wondering if you only see a cursor because your PXE boot has some type of graphics that cannot be shown over serial. It sounds like you may be looking for the remote KVM feature availabe in AMT 6. /community/openportit/vproexpert/microsoft-vpro/blog/2010/05/07/kvm-remote-control-with-microsoft-system-center-service-manager-2010 http://communities.intel.com/community/openportit/vproexpert/microsoft-vpro/blog/2010/05/07/kvm-remote-control-with-microsoft-system-center-service-manager-2010

Since AFAIK the serial is text only, you could create an unintended ISO install for windows and use RISL /docs/DOC-5943 http://communities.intel.com/docs/DOC-5943 or there is probably I assume a way to do it directly from SCCM and not use RISL (sorry I don't know SCCM.) It's also possible to add in a VNC server to your install if you need to watch it happen. /docs/DOC-5095 http://communities.intel.com/docs/DOC-5095

I assume since you are trying to boot PXE you already have some type of imaging program, but it has graphics so it's not displaying over the SOL connection. If this is the case I'm not sure how to help you without remote KVM, but there are a lot of people here way smarter than me, so I am curious to see the other responses.

/docs/DOC-6044 http://communities.intel.com/docs/DOC-6044 seems to have more info on OS deployment with AMT from SCCM.

I'm curious to see other responses as I'm interested in doing something similar eventually in a production environment.

Sorry I couldn't be more help!

Matt

Re: SCCM Serial Connection

BMull — Wed, 26 Jan 2011 09:01:39 GMT

Hey Matt,

Thanks for you're in depth response.

To answer your question yes we do use SCCM to deploy images. I wanted to extend the power of SCCM and allow the tech team to power on a workstation, boot from PXE, type in the PXE boot password and select the task sequence from OOD.

It must be that serial connection in OOB cannot handle the graphics in the PXE boot Image. I'm surprised as I thought this would be a selling point for OOB within SCCM. It's worth asking Microsoft about it or if somebody knows that would be great.

Thanks again Matt,

Regards,

Re: SCCM Serial Connection

idata — Wed, 09 Feb 2011 20:56:36 GMT

As Matt stated, the Serial-Over-LAN terminal in SCCM is a text-only tool. If you have clients that are KVM Remote Control capable, you can use the Real VNC Viewer Plus to connect to them and enter the required password in once the OSD process goes into a GUI. Microsoft dosn't support KVM capability in SCCM.