Needed to set up a cluster where horsepower and cost were paramount, so I thought this would be a good opportunity to try out Intel's business class "vPro AMT" remote administration technology, and compare it to IPMI, which I've used for years on servers. From a feature standpoint, it seems quite impressive, going to far as using standards-based VNC!

Unfortunately, set up is quite a bear, with most of a day spent and while I can remote power cycle the machine via a web interface, VNC support is still not to be found. I have no intention of buying Windows licenses for all these machines just so I can enable AMT. (the VNC remote desktop solution)

So far, it would seem that the Intel approach is very Windows-oriented, to the point where I've been unable to find any official documentation at all as to how to make it work with *nix. After some googling and trying to make sense of the "enterprise reference documentation" I came across http://blog.yarda.eu/2012/09/intel-amt-quickstart-guide.html which apparently was working as recently as October of this year. (see the comments)

However, it would seem that intel has pulled support for some of this, as pages like http://intel.com/wbem/wscim/1/ips-schema/1/IPS_KVMRedirectionSettingData and http://schemas.dmtf.org/wbem/wscim/1/cim-schema/2/CIM_KVMRedirectionSAP simply resolve to 404, numerous attempts to google "IPS_KVMRedirectionSettingData" and such haven't (so far) returned anything useful.

From what it seems, Intel wants everybody to be installing PKI AMT certificates on vPro motherboards via Windows.

Does anybody have any information that might be useful about how to enable unencrypted VNC remote administration for CentOS based servers? I have a used KVM switch, but that's always been a sub-optimum solution, and it really makes a mess out of your server cages.