Selecting Hardware for Emergency Management Services
Applies To: Windows Server 2003, Windows Server 2003 R2, Windows Server 2003 with SP1, Windows Server 2003 with SP2
Selecting hardware for Emergency Management Services
Emergency Management Services must be integrated with properly designed hardware in order to manage Windows Server 2003 operating systems completely and successfully.
The three key areas you must address to fully integrate your platform with Emergency Management Services are as follows:
Ensure that you have appropriate hardware for an out-of-band management port. Windows Server 2003 operating systems support a legacy serial port and hardware that uses the Universal Asynchronous Receiver/Transmitter (UART) interface provided by a service processor.
The user interface for the system firmware and out-of-band management service processor should use the same communication medium as Emergency Management Services. If the firmware is using the out-of-band port, the firmware should deliver the medium over to Emergency Management Services cleanly after the power-on self test (POST) process has completed. The firmware should also use the same terminal conventions as Emergency Management Services, using the same keystrokes to represent keys such as F12. These criteria are recommended, not required. For more information, see VT-UTF8, VT100+, and VT100 conventions.
The firmware must be able to pass the configuration settings of the out-of-band port to the operating system using the Serial Port Console Redirection (SPCR) table. The firmware stores configuration settings in the SPCR table, and the operating system reads them if the appropriate settings are in the Boot.ini file or the Extensible Firmware Interface (EFI). For more information, see "Emergency Management Services" at the Microsoft Windows Resource Kits Web site.
For additional information about selecting hardware, see Support resources.
This section covers: