Intel® SCS Add-on 2.1 and SC2012 R2 ConfigMgr Integration (RCS Database mode) - Part 0

Considerations

As mentioned on TechNet, System Center 2012 R2 Configuration Manager’s feature “Out of band management” doesn’t support the following versions of Intel® AMT.

Supported Configurations for Configuration Manager (#Out of Band Management)

https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/gg682077.aspx#BKMK_SupConfigOOB

  • Intel AMT version 3.2 with a minimum revision of 3.2.1
  • Intel AMT version 4.0, version 4.1, and version 4.2
  • Intel AMT version 5.0 and version 5.2 with a minimum revision of 5.2.10
  • Intel AMT version 6.0 and version 6.1

To support versions of AMT higher than 6.1, Intel® SCS Add-on 2.1 for Microsoft* System Center Configuration Manager has to be integrated with System Center 2012 R2 Configuration Manager.

This blogs gathers all needed information to integrate Intel® SCS Add-on with System Center Configuration Manager. It will cover installation, configuration and testing of the overall solution.

This blog has been created based on Intel® SCS Add-on documentation (Intel(R)_SCS_Addon_SCCM_2012.pdf), on our TechNet site and on support case from past.

Configuration options of Intel SCS

Intel SCS Add-on offers 2 types of configuration;

  • Host-based Configuration
  • Remote Configuration (RCS)

For more details about these 2 types of configuration, please report to Intel® SCS Add-on documentation (2.6.5 Selecting the Configuration Method). Basically, Host-based Configuration will only offer limited features of Intel® AMT, whereas RCS will cover the full features of Intel® AMT.

In this blog, we followed Intel recommendations for any Intel related software.

It’s important to note that, based on Intel SCS documentation (3.6.1 Supported SQL Server Versions), the SQL Server versions supported for the RCS Database mode are as follows:

  • Microsoft* SQL Server* 2008 x32/x64 (SP1) Enterprise Edition
  • Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 x64 (SP1) Enterprise Edition
  • Microsoft SQL Server 2005 x32 (SP4) Enterprise Edition

However, in this blog, we installed RCS database on the same database server as the SCCM primary site server. This database server is running SQL Server 2012 SP1 Standard Edition.

Agenda of this 6 parts article

Here’s the overview of the different parts of the articles:

  1. AD and Certificates preparation for OOB
  2. RCS Server installation
  3. Intel AMT profile creation
  4. ConfigMgr 2012 R2 configuration
  5. Intel SCS Add-on installation
  6. Intel AMT deployment

Comments

  • Anonymous
    January 29, 2016
    Hi Hammoudi, great write up thanks a lot. I am seeing an issue with dell systems that I have provisioned using your tutorial. Once a power on task has been sent to a machine using Intel amt, the machine will not remain shutdown or in sleep, it keeps powering back on until I reset the power at the wall. Have you seen anything similar?