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How do I activate Intel vPro technology?

idata
Employee
2,696 Views

Hi,

My company uses Dell laptops as standard. We have offices in Ireland and the USA. We need to remotely administrate laptops in the USA offices from here in Ireland. We have standardised to Dell PCs and Laptops with Vostro as the standard admin spec and Latitude e6410/e6510 as the Developer spec. I have been told by our Dell account manager that the Intel vPro technology just needs to be activated on these laptops.

I checked out this post /docs/DOC-3159 http://communities.intel.com/docs/DOC-3159 and viewed the demos but am still unsure how exactly to active vPro.

How do I activate Intel vPro technology?

Thanks in advance for any help,

Kieran.

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idata
Employee
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We have created an Activation Wizard to help you decide what the best activation method is. Please take a look at this site and see if it helps answer some of your questions: http://www.intel.com/go/vpro101 http://www.intel.com/go/vpro101

Step 4 on this site is the Wizard that can make a recommendation for your particular case. If you still have questions, please come back to this Ask an Expert site.

idata
Employee
987 Views

Hi,

I reviewed the http://www.intel.com/go/vpro101 http://www.intel.com/go/vpro101 and checked step 4 for custom activation. This pops up anothe page which has a lot of options. I located this webpage http://www.intel.com/itcenter/products/core/index.htm http://www.intel.com/itcenter/products/core/index.htm which seesm like the correct place but I cannot find a faq or white paper explaining how to activate vPro technology on the processor of our laptops. Please advise.

Thanks,

Kieran.

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idata
Employee
987 Views

The Dell Latitude E6410 and E6510 notebooks can be remotely managed using Intel vPro Technology. The Vostro series is not on my list of Intel vPro Technology ready systems so you might want to verify with Dell that they are Intel vPro capable.

For remote manageability you want to setup and configure the Intel AMT part of Intel vPro Technology. Intel has provided several methods that can be used to setup and configure the Intel AMT firmware. The best method for you depends on your environment and your goals. For example, if you are using Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager you can configure the systems remotely and then manage them with the same Microsoft tools. Symantec Altiris, LANDesk, HP, and other vendors of management software have similar methods to remotely setup and configure systems. If you don't have a console with this capability (the Activation Wizard has a list), you can use the free Intel Setup and Configuration Service (a download is available on this site).

Here is snapshot of the methods:

  • Manual (go to each machine and enter the Management Engine BIOS Extension (MEBx) when you boot and change the settings one by one) The options in the MEBx are posted on this site--be sure to look at the one for your Intel AMT version (6.0 for the Dell E6510/6410).

     

  • USB Key (use a free tool from Intel to create the settings on a USB key then boot each system with the key. This site has a Use Case Reference Design that gives detailed steps.)

     

  • Remotely configure the systems using a 3rd party management console.

     

  • Use the Intel SCS 7.0 tool to remotely setup your Intel AMT 6.0 systems (you create an XML file with the Intel SCS tool and send it to the remote machine with the free Configurator utility that comes with Intel SCS 7.0. The instructions are provided with the tool.)

     

If your company requires you to use certificate based security when doing the remote setup and configuration, then you can do that using the built-in certificates in each Intel AMT system (you will need to buy the corresponding certificate for the configuration server), or you can use a couple other methods to get the certificates (use pre-shared keys or an internal certificate authority).

My suggestion is to look at the options in Step 4 of the vPro 101 site, choose some options and get to the final screen with a recomendation based on your specific environment. Then you can configure a couple systems in your lab using the manual configuration method so you can test how you are going to remotely manage the systems.

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