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Users of S3000 & S5000V/X/S chipsets running on Microsoft Windows Server 2008 will experience “General Access Denied” error when Hyper-V host machine is restarted after Intel IPMI driver installation.

IPMI or “Intelligent Platform Management Interface” is a piece of software that sends status messages from vital system parts also allowing management applications to interact at low level hardware layers for real-time system health checks (yes, also temperatures, fan speeds, voltages, etc.) / configuration changes.

Intel IPMI driver is installed by one of the following products: Intel Active System Console 3.0; Intel Server Management Pack 3.0; Intel One Boot Flash Update Utility 9.7; Intel System Configuration Utility for Windows 5.0.1 & Intel System Event Log Viewer (SEL) 2.0.1.

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We all know, and some of us even used virtualization software such as VMWare Workstation, VMWare GSX Server, Microsoft Virtual PC or Virtual Server, but very few of us got access to real hardware assisted virtualization. Except from proprietary systems such as IBM Regatta (Alpha based mainframe), hardware virtualization was nearly inexistent in entry-mid level WinTel server market. Things started to change a few years ago when hardware assisted virtualization was build in by entry-mid server CPU manufacturers (Intel & AMD). Another option became available at the time: VMWare ESX Server.

VMWare ESX became the preferred software to manage hardware assisted virtualization. With support for virtual networks and clustering, ESX started to conquer market share. Companies started to talk about high availability (via clustering of virtual machines), server consolidation (no need for a physical platform to host Active Directory Services, PKIs, IAS, Web or other non storage demanding roles), platform on demand (with a few mouse clicks you have a full blown system running or revert to a previous system snapshot), etc.

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