AMT drivers

Overview

AMT (Active Management Technology) drivers extend Ironic’s range to the desktop. AMT/vPro is widely used in desktops to remotely control their power, similar to IPMI in servers.

AMT drivers use WS-MAN protocol to interact with AMT clients. They work on AMT 7.0/8.0/9.0. AMT 7.0 was released in 2010, so AMT drivers should work on most PCs with vPro.

The staging-amt hardware type uses AMT for power and boot device management.

Set up your environment

A detailed reference is available in Intel Active Management Technology.

A short guide follows below:

• Set up AMT Client

  • Choose a system which supports Intel AMT / vPro. Desktop and laptop systems that support this can often be identified by looking at the “Intel” tag for the word vPro.
  • During boot, press Ctrl+P to enter Intel MEBx management.
  • Reset password – default is admin. The new password must contain at least one upper case letter, one lower case letter, one digit and one special character, and be at least eight characters.
  • Go to Intel AMT Configuration:
    • Enable all features under SOL/IDER/KVM section
    • Select User Consent and choose None (No password is needed)
    • Select Network Setup section and set IP
    • Activate Network Access
  • MEBx Exit
  • Restart and enable PXE boot in bios

• Install openwsman on servers where ironic-conductor is running:

  • Fedora/RHEL: openwsman-python.
  • Ubuntu: python-openwsman‘s most recent version is 2.4.3 which is enough.
  • Or build it yourself from: https://github.com/Openwsman/openwsman

• Enable the staging-amt hardware type, power, deploy and management interfaces, for example:

  [DEFAULT]
  enabled_hardware_types = staging-amt,ipmi
  enabled_deploy_interfaces = staging-amt,iscsi,direct
  enabled_management_interfaces = staging-amt,ipmitool
  enabled_power_interfaces = staging-amt,ipmitool
  

  and restart the ironic-conductor process:

  service ironic-conductor restart

• Enroll an AMT node

• Specify these driver_info properties for the node: amt_password,

  amt_address, and amt_username

• Boot an instance

Note

It is recommended that nodes using the pxe_amt* driver be deployed with the local boot option. This is because the AMT firmware currently has no support for setting a persistent boot device. Nodes deployed without the local boot option could fail to boot if they are restarted outside of Ironic’s control (I.E. rebooted by a local user) because the node will not attempt to PXE / network boot the kernel, using local boot solves this known issue.