Fujitsu IRMC S2/S3 manual Ipmi technical background, Intelligent Platform Management, Objective

IPMI - technical background

1.5IPMI - technical background

The iRMC S2/S3 makes the BMC functions available over the IPMI interface.

Intelligent Platform Management

The “Intelligent Platform Management” initiative is a response to the increasing complexity of modern server systems. A number of manufacturers have joined this initiative in order to come up with a new solution for monitoring these server systems.

The term “Intelligent Platform Management” expresses the core aspect of this approach to the solution: Functions for monitoring and recovery of systems are implemented directly in the hardware and firmware for platform management.

Objective

The objective was to define a standardized, abstract and message-based interface between the central system controller (Baseboard Management Controller - BMC) and intelligent platform management hardware.

The standardization committees combined the central characteristics of various platform management modules into standardized descriptions.

Definition

The IPMI specification defines:

“IPMI is a hardware level interface specification that is ‘management software neutral’ providing monitoring and control functions that can be exposed through standard management software interfaces such as DMI, WMI, CIM, SNMP, etc. As a hardware level interface, it sits at the bottom of a typical management software stack” [see section "IPMI and other management standards" on page 22].

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