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iRMC S2/S3 21
IPMI - technical background
1.5 IPMI - 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].