IPMI support

LANDesk Management Suite includes support for Intelligent Platform Management Interface (IPMI) 1.5 and 2.0. IPMI is a specification developed by Intel, Hewlett-Packard, NEC, and Dell to define the message and system interface for management-enabled hardware. IPMI contains monitoring and recovery features that let you access many features regardless of whether or not the machine is powered on, or what state the OS may be in. For more details on IPMI, visit Intel's Web site.

IPMI monitoring is handled by the BMC (baseboard management controller). The BMC operates on standby power and autonomously polls system health status. If the BMC detects that any elements are out of range, you can configure the resulting IPMI actions, such as logging the event, generating alerts, or performing automatic recovery actions such as system power-down or reset.

You must have SMBIOS 2.3.1 or higher installed in order for the BMC to be detected on the system. If the BMC is not detected, you may not see some IPMI information in reports, exports, and so forth.

IPMI defines common interfaces to the hardware used to monitor physical health characteristics, such as temperature, voltage, fans, power supplies, and chassis intrusion. In addition to health monitoring, IPMI includes other system management capabilities including automatic alerting, automatic system shutdown and restart, remote restart and power control capabilities, and asset tracking.

The Management Suite menu choices vary slightly for an IPMI-enabled device, depending on the state of the operating system.

Management features for IPMI-enabled devices

Monitoring capabilities depend on what has been installed on the device being monitored, as well as the state of the device. Any IPMI-enabled device with a baseboard management controller (BMC) can be monitored by the administrator console in limited ways with no additional management agents after the BMC has been configured. This includes out-of-band management when the device is powered down or the OS isn't functional. Full-featured management is available when the management agent is installed, a BMC is present, the device is powered on, and the OS is functional. The table below compares the functionality available with these different configurations.

	BMC only*	BMC + agent	Agent (no IPMI)
Out-of-band management enabled	X	X
In-band management enabled		X	X
Device can be discovered**	X	X	X
Read environment sensors	X	X	Hardware dependent
Power on/off remotely	X	X	X
Read & clear event log	X	X
Configure alerts	X	X	X
Read OS information		X	X
Graceful shutdown		X	X
Read SMBIOS information (processor, slots, memory)		X	X
IP syncing (OS to BMC)		X
Watchdog timer		X
BMC communicates with core server	X	X
Local Management Suite components communicate with core server		X	X
Full range of Management Suite management features		X

*Standard BMC. The mini BMC is a scaled-down version of a baseboard management controller. It has the functionality listed above, with limitations such as the following:

Does not support serial over LAN (SOL redirection)
Has only one username for BMC management
Uses only one channel for communicating with the BMC
Has a smaller system event log (SEL) repository

**If the BMC is not configured, it will not respond to ASF pings which the product uses to discover IPMI. This means that you will have to discover it as a normal computer. When you deploy a management agent, the server configuration executable will scan the system, detect that it is IPMI, and configure the BMC.

Conflicts with IPMI drivers

When you install this product on an IPMI device, if that device already has a hardware-specific IPMI driver installed, and if that driver is supported by this product, that driver will be used.

If there is no IPMI driver on the device, Management Suite will install the OSA IPMI driver.

If you have installed other management software that includes IPMI drivers on devices you want to manage with this product, you may need to uninstall those products before you can deploy Management Suite agents with IPMI management features.

For example, Microsoft Windows Server 2003 includes IPMI support through the installation of Windows Remote Management (WinRM), which includes a Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI) provider and an IPMI driver. However, Management Suite does not support the installation of that IPMI driver and installs its own IPMI driver. If WinRM has been installed on a device that you want to manage with Management Suite, you must first uninstall WinRM through Windows Add/Remove Programs (Start > Control Panel > Add or Remove Programs > Add/Remove Windows Components > Management and Monitoring Tools > clear the Hardware Management check box > click OK).