What is your vision to deploying Intel vPro?
As you prepare to implement Intel vPro technology, or perhaps you have already enabled the technology - what are your plans to actually utilize it?
One of the most common production usages is simply reliable remote power-on of systems.
A more involved and interesting use case is the IDE-Redirection. At the core, this enables overriding the default BIOS boot order. The administrator is able to point to a different local or remote boot device, boot image (ISO or IMG), or force a PXE-boot.
Related to the IDE-Redirection is Serial-over-LAN (SoL). Serial-over-LAN provides two key capabilities
Okay - now let's discuss some real world scenarios and associated challenges. An administrator initiates an IDE-Redirection to run some diagnostic utilities from a bootable image utility disk. If the utility is VT100/ANSI console compliant - great. However, many recovery utilities are GUI based (i.e. Microsoft ERD).
Here's a few hints to how real-world customers and deployments are combining tools and capabilities to take advantage of IDE-Redirection and Serial-over-LAN
The above ideas are just a sampling of how customers are using the IDE-Redirection functionality of Intel vPro in an Altiris Client Management environment. Interested if you have more ideas.
One last thought - to give you a glance of what is possible using the Windows Serial-over-LAN driver - take a look at http://communities.intel.com/openport/blogs/proexpert/2008/09/26/oob-gui-access-using-sol-and-tcp-redirection