One of my many activities over the last few days has been taking a look at whether my work notebook PC supports the Intel vPro/Active Management Technology (AMT) functionality (it doesn’t seem to).
Intel vPro/AMT adds out of band management capabilities to PC hardware, integrated into the CPU, chipset and network card (this animation shows more details) and is also a pre-requisite for Citrix XenClient which, at least until Microsoft gets itself in order with a decent client-side virtualisation solution, I was hoping to use as a solution for running multiple desktops on a single PC. Sadly I don’t seem to have the necessary hardware.
Anyway, thanks to a very useful forum post by Amit Kulkarni, I found that there is a tool to check for the presence of AMT – in the AMT software development kit (SDK)Â is a discovery tool (discovery.exe), which can be used to scan the network for AMT devices.
Unfortunately, vPro/AMT only seems to be in the high-spec models for most OEMs right now… until then I’m stuck with hosted virtualisation solutions.
Hi! Am glad that you found the SDK! I’m the community manager for the Intel vPro Expert Center & we have a tool called AMTScan.exe (http://communities.intel.com/docs/DOC-2061) that you might want to look at – *and* we have a catalog of some of the vPro models by the major OEMs (http://communities.intel.com/docs/DOC-2033). We also have a Dynamic Virtual Client sub-community with some XenClient info in it. :-)
Michele
http://www.intel.com/go/vproexpert
Hi Michele – thanks for your comments – I’ll check out AMTscan. Cheers, Mark
Paul Iddon has just highlighted that there is now a PowerShell Provider for vPro.