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.

There are two AMT drivers:

• pxe_amt uses AMT for power management and deploys the user image over iSCSI from the conductor
• agent_amt uses AMT for power management and deploys the user image directly to the node via HTTP.

Set up your environment

A detailed reference is available here, and a short guide follows below:

https://software.intel.com/en-us/articles/intel-active-management-technology-start-here-guide-intel-amt-9#4.2

• 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 pxe_amt or agent_amt driver by adding it to the configuration option enabled_drivers (typically located at /etc/ironic/ironic.conf) 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.