Virtualization anyone?

[ljwhitmire]

Forgive me if this is the wrong forum, but we are just getting into AMT and are primarily interested in the virtualization aspect. Our application is a little large and windows dependent to put into Vpro, but running parts of it in a hypervisor might give us the ability to insure the integrity of our application and insure it's tamper proof.

I've been able to locate the SDKs for Vpro and other AMT pieces, is there anything yet for the virtualization piece? Am I even asking the correct question? :)

Thanks for any pointers, all I've been able to find so far is marketing information. I'm sold, so now I just need technical info.

Thanks!!!

[Gael_H_Intel]

Hi, and thank you for your post. While the manageability forum covers many topics such as Intel vPro processor technology and Intel Active Management Technology (Intel AMT), Intel Virtualization Technology is more focused on application and processor technologies. At this time there isnt a virtualization aspect of Intel AMT, but, if you would elaborate on what kinds of things your application is trying to do and how you think Intel AMT could be used? That would be a useful discussion we could have here.

[Ylian_S_Intel]

vPro has a feature called "Virtual Appliance" (VA), it's not often used but if you repartition your hard disk to free up, say 50 megs and run a special installer, you can have the BIOS validate and boot an Hypervisor and load your "Virtual Applicance" below the OS. It's nice because it's tamper proof, but as I understand it, it's generaly used to provide network filtering, etc. The VA can provide a web page just like AMT, etc. It's not like real virtualization software, I am not sure what is virtualized and what is not.

The nice thing about a VA is that it's tamper proof and runs on the main processor. The draw backs are that installation is not easy if you need to resize the disk partitions, and requires changing BIOS settings which is difficult on a large scale. Of course, with Intel AMT you can change BIOS settings remotely, whichhappens to be useful in this case.

Let us know if this is what your looking for, if so, I will try to find details on this.

Ylian (Intel AMT Blog)

[ljwhitmire]

That's exactly what I am looking for. We have a incident/problem management software product that could benefit from having parts of our agent tamper proof. We've been talking with Intel about Vpro and Virtual Appliance more at a marketing level. I was trying to track down some technical details about what is involved to get a better idea what the development costs would be versus the benefit we derive from it.

Any information you can point me to would be great. We just purchased one machine with VPro so we should be able to play around with it at least.