Enabling Hardware Management

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Applies To: Windows Server 2003 R2

The Hardware Management (including WS-Management) feature is not installed by default in Windows Server 2003 R2. This section highlights the steps involved in getting the feature installed and enabled.

Installation Steps

In Windows Server 2003 R2, you can install Hardware Management is available from the Management and Monitoring Tools section of the Add/Remove Windows Components Wizard (See the following figure):

Windows Components Wizare - Management and Monitor

  1. In Control Panel, select Add or Remove Programs.

  2. Select Add/Remove Windows Components.

  3. Select Management and Monitoring Tools and press the Details button to bring up the following window.

    Management and Monitoring Tools - Hardware Managem

  4. Choose the Hardware Management option. If a BMC is detected via the SMBIOS Table Type 38h, the following dialog box will be displayed:

    IPMI - 3rd Party Drivers

  5. If no 3rd party IPMI drivers are installed or they have been removed from the system, press the OK button to continue. Otherwise, press the Cancel button, remove the 3rd party IPMI driver and reinstall the Hardware Management Component.

    Note

    The IPMI driver currently cannot detect if a third-party IPMI driver is installed that does not have well-known device identifiers.

  6. Press the OK button to select the Hardware Management Component, and then press the Next button. Hardware Management (including WinRM) will be installed.

Plug and Play BMC Support

The IPMI driver supports ACPI (Plug and Play). To fully support this feature, however, the BMC resources must be exposed via ACPI by the system’s BIOS. This capability may be supported in new systems or from a BIOS upgrade. If the BMC is detected via Plug and Play, you will notice an Unknown Device appear in Device Manager before the Hardware Management component is installed.

If the BMC resources are exposed properly via ACPI, the Windows Plug and Play infrastructure will detect the hardware and automatically install the IPMI driver. A new device, named Microsoft Generic IPMI Compliant Device, will appear in Device Manager, as shown below:

Device Manager - Microsoft Generic IPMI Compliant

Creating the SMBIOS IPMI Device

If your system does not automatically detect the BMC via Plug and Play and install the driver, but a BMC was detected during the setup process, the BMC device must be manually created.

To create the IPMI BMC device, execute the following command from a command prompt:

Rundll32 ipmisetp.dll, AddTheDevice

Once this command is executed, the IPMI device will be created and can be seen under the Device Manager as Microsoft Generic IPMI Compliant Device. The device will be removed when the Hardware Management component is uninstalled.