Virtual AMT for Unified Management of Physical and Virtual Desktops

To reduce the burden of administrators in enterprises, current PCs are equipped with Intel Active Management Technology (AMT). AMT enables administrators to perform hardware-level remote management of desktops even on system failures. Recently, however, virtual desktops are emerging with virtual machines (VMs), e.g., In Desktop as a Service (DaaS). Since physical and virtual desktops are mixed in current enterprises, administrators have to manage them using two different tools: that for AMT and that for VMs. In this paper, we propose vAMT, which is virtual AMT for VMs. vAMT provides the same interfaces as AMT: WS-Management, SOAP, and KVM interfaces. Using AMT and vAMT, administrators can perform unified management of physical and virtual desktops without being aware of the differences in most of the operations. We have implemented vAMT and confirmed that the existing management tools for AMT could also manage virtual desktops.