Implementation Of The Intelligent Platform Management System Based On IPMI

The term intelligent platform management refers to autonomous monitoring and recovery features implemented directly in platform management hardware and firmware. This typically includes monitoring elements such as CPU operation, fans, system temperature, voltage, etc. The key characteristic of intelligent platform management is that the inventory, monitoring, logging, and recovery control functions are available independent of the main processor, BIOS, and the operating system. Plaform management function can also be made available when the system is in a powered down state. IPMI specification privides the function of managing the cross-platform system hardware, which means to manage different kinds of systems. And it is possible to implement a high-availability system. Intelligent Platform Management is very important to the enterprise-class management, because platform status information can be obtained and recovery actions initiated under situations where system management software and normal 'in-band' management mechanisms are unavailable.The efficient management of the platform system is a difficult problem to the system manager. In the past, the only way to check the working status of the numerous and different systems is to check the systems one by one on the spot. When the network invented, it is possible to seperately monitor the systems by the remote management interface. But there is no integrated management to these numerous systems. A cross-plateform management system, the intelligent plateform management system based on IPMI, is designed in this thesis, which brings great convenient to the managers.Compared with the traditional platform management system, we make some improvements on the intelligent platform management system, which are the main contribution and innovations of this thesis.Firstly, we use an independent controller called BMC, which is on the system baseboard or the blade server. The independent platform management system composed of the BMC and the IPMI firmware makes the management and control functions available independent of the main processors, BIOS, and operating system. Plaform management function can also be made available when the system is in a powered down state.Secondly, we implement the event process, including the sensor initialization, event message generation and record, platform event filter and altering. We use the LM75 temperature sensor to monitor and control the temperature of the baseboard.Thirdly, we implement the SOL function. The typical goal of this capability is to redirect the traffic to/from a local asynchronous serial controller interface. This enables communication over LAN with local software that only understands how to communicate through a local serial controller. This can be used for implementing a virtual remote serial terminal for enabling the user or remote software interaction with serial-based interfaces for operating systems, management services and BIOS.Lastly, the system we designed supports cross-platform system management The IPMB interface and ICMB interface are provided to implement the communication between the blade servers in the same chasis and the different chasises.