Intel® vPro™ Technology

Remote System Repair Using Intel® vPro™ Technology

Introduction

Problem Summary and Motivation
Enterprise IT personnel have to ensure that client platforms located on premise or in extended offices can function effectively and efficiently with minimum interruption of service to end users. The operational state of a system depends on fully functioning hardware and software components. When a component fails, IT experts utilize software agents in the operating system (OS) to initiate remediation. Typically, IT shops use off-the-shelf software to perform such tasks, but when such actions do not fix the problem, IT technicians have to make desk-side visits to resolve the problem. Situations such as the inability to boot the user’s OS, sluggish performance of an OS, or malfunctioning network drivers usually warrant desk-side visits.

As enterprises transition to using mobile systems, such as laptop or notebook computers that increase worker productivity inside and outside the enterprise, the ability to support these platforms when they are remotely located, poses a considerable challenge.

There are two solutions currently utilized to address this challenge of supporting clients remotely. However, both of these solutions have limitations. The two solutions and their limitations are:

• Embed a diagnostic/spare-tire OS, such as Windows PE* or Windows XP*, in an unused disk partition in a local storage device. While original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) deploy this solution, IT shops usually replace the hard disk content with a custom image tailored for their own employees. Further, adding another OS such as an XP-embedded (XPE*) one, which is the most suitable OS for downtime productivity, usually involves significant additional capital cost per client as well as increased maintenance costs.
• Download the diagnostic/spare-tire OS from IT’s remote console to the client on a demand basis. While this is feasible, there is no well-defined mechanism to search, locate, and manage a client, or to query the operational state or the platform integrity over the Internet on demand.

Desktop and mobile platforms with Intel® vPro™ technology and Intel® Active Management Technology (Intel® AMT) provide new features to better support PCs remotely and remove some limitations of current solutions, reduce the need for desk-side visits, and reduce operational costs. Intel Fast Call for Help, IDE-Redirection (IDE-R), and platform Remote Access that uses Serial-over-LAN (SOL) are features of Intel AMT that provide the infrastructure to support platforms remotely while providing robustness and availability of the solutions even when the OS is not present.

While Intel vPro technology addresses many of the challenges of supporting platforms remotely, it is important to note these embedded technologies operate in very constrained environments. These may include environments where the power is low, and where limited static and dynamic memory is available. Such environments could potentially undercut some performance capabilities of the embedded OS.

In this article, we propose a two-stage solution architecture: Remote System Repair (RSR). In this solution, the features of Intel vPro technology, Fast Call for Help, and IDE-R are used together to perform platform diagnostics and repair. While Fast Call for Help enables a secure connection to the management console, IDE-R and SOL are used to provide tools to heal the client remotely.

Organization of This Article
This article is organized as follows. We first look at two applicable problem scenarios and describe why existing in-enterprise solutions cannot be used to repair on-the-go mobile clients. We then discuss the ingredients of Intel vPro technology that are used in the remote heal solution and describe three use cases to showcase this solution at work. We also provide a sample solution sequence that uses Microsoft MS-DOS*, and show how someone can construct a solution to solve remote repair problems. We move on to outline the performance challenges encountered and how we resolved them with Intel vPro technology. Finally, we extend the solution to service-based heal usages in constrained deployment environments that could be delivered to small and medium size businesses (SMBs) using a subscription or pay-per-use model. We wrap up by looking at the future of the RSR model.

Back to Top