IPMI (Intelligent Platform Management Interface)

A specification, developed by Dell, HP, Intel and NEC, that defines interfaces for use in monitoring the physical health of servers, such as temperature, voltage, fans, power supplies and chassis. The goal is to allow easier management of large numbers of servers from multiple vendors.

Analysts say it can help reduce costs by letting administrators remotely manage, diagnose and reboot servers whether the operating system is running or the system has crashed. It does it regardless of platform.

Users might have IPMI running on their servers and not even know it. Today, systems vendors for the most part do not actively promote the standard, although it increasingly is being embedded into servers, storage and other network devices. About 150 vendors have adopted IPMI.

"It's amazing how little is known in corporate IT about IPMI," says Ulrich Seif, CIO at National Semiconductor in Santa Clara. "IPMI might be one of the least-known standards in the industry."

IPMI is a message-based hardware management interface that is implemented at the silicon level and uses a baseboard management controller, which is a small processor that sets up IPMI as a subsystem independent of the server's CPU or operating system. It enables remote monitoring, management and recovery capabilities, regardless of the status of the server.

IPMI can be exposed through any standard management software interface such as Common Information Model, SNMP and Windows Management Instrumentation. It can feed into higher-level management software such as HP's OpenView.

IPMI 2.0, unveiled at the Intel Developers Forum in 2003, is expected to be ratified by its promoters by the middle of next year. It is the third iteration of the specification that took a giant step forward with its last update when it enabled management of servers via the network. To get IPMI capabilities, administrators previously had to be working on the system itself or connecting through a serial port, says Steve Rokov, director of marketing at OSA Technologies, which makes IPMI software and firmware.

"This offered a way to extend accessibility over the LAN," Rokov says. "So administrators could be at the farthest reaches of the enterprise and could still monitor and manage their servers."

But security issues dogged some IT managers who implemented at the specification. IPMI 2.0 addresses security concerns, Rokov says. It supports encryption and requires authentication before allowing access to the baseboard management controller. IPMI 2.0 also supports virtual LANs (VLANs).

"Like Rosettanet/XML-enabled transactions on the business application side, IPMI provides a standardized interface to the 'vitals' of a system. Support of encryption [Advanced Encryption Standard] and authentication [via SHA-1] together with VLAN capability now add the right feature set to allow an administrator to leverage the IPMI functionality securely over the network," National's Seif says. "All these capabilities will be embraced by administrators. Who wouldn't want to remotely and securely administer a server in trouble?"

From Server mgmt. standard gaining steam, Network World, 12/01/03.

Additional resources

Intel IPMI page
Has copies of the latest version of the specification.

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