The Intelligent Platform Management Interface (IPMI)



It's really important to understand that system administrators can manage a system remotely even in the absence of an operating system or of the system management software, or even if the monitored system is powered off but connected to a power source. That can be done through IPMI.

In fact, I was exited to stumble on a Wiki article on IPMI via Facebook and I couldn't help replicating it here.

The Intelligent Platform Management Interface (IPMI) specification is an Intel led standard which defines a set of common interfaces to a computer system which system administrators can use to monitor system health and manage the system. More than two hundred companies support IPMI. Dell, HP, Intel Corporation and NEC Corporation announced IPMI v1.0 on 1998-09-16, v1.5 on 2001-03-01, and v2.0 on 2004-02-14.

The technology is now considered a de-facto standard.

IPMI Functionality

An IPMI sub-system operates independently of the operating system and allows administrators to manage a system remotely even in the absence of an operating system or of the system management software, or even if the monitored system is powered off but connected to a power source. IPMI can also function after the operating system has started, and exposes management data and structures to the system management software. IPMI prescribes only the structure and format of the interfaces as a standard, while detailed implementations may vary.

An implementation of IPMI version 1.5 can send out alerts via a direct serial connection or via a side-band local area network (LAN) connection to a remote client. The side-band LAN connection utilizes the board Network Interface Controller (NIC). This solution is less expensive than a dedicated LAN connection but also has limited bandwidth. Systems compliant with IPMI version 2.0 can also send alerts via serial over LAN. System administrators can then use IPMI messaging to query platform status, to review hardware logs, or to issue other requests from a remote console through the same connections. The standard also defines an alerting mechanism for the system to send a simple network management protocol (SNMP) platform event trap (PET).