Extra money for a Intel CPU with Intel vPro Enterprise worth it? Any free software to use it for IP KVM at home?

[teslaguy]

Anyone here use Intel vPro at home for IP KVM / remote console?

I need to decide if I should spend more money on upgrading an Intel “vPro® Essentials” CPU to another model which has “vPro® Enterprise” - the later is the only one which seems to allow remote KVM.

The thing that’s ambiguous to me is which open source or free software can integrate with this or if intel offers a web interface similar to Supermicro IPMI… does anyone have any experience with the latest generation of vPro? I only used it before on Sandy Bridge platform and I am sure my knowledge is deprecated.

[Ruklaw]

Look at mesh commander.

There is a lightweight version you can install onto the firmware, no other pc necessary - Open Software Projects - Firmware

It works great in the most part, although I did have a situation once where the pc and vpro stopped talking after a reboot and I had to walk over and pull the power.

[teslaguy]

thanks! Just to confirm - meshcommander would still require “vPro enterprise” in order to work; or does this firmware override any licensing stuff that may have been disabled by intel for the KVM part?

[Ruklaw]

It’ll have the same limitations - so it will work with the lesser license but you won’t have remote kvm