I understand that IPMI is a way of communicating to the BMC onbard from an external world. And this communication is possible via IPMI which is a secure protocol to talk to these devices. But Im confused as to which OSI layer does the IPMI exactly belong to? Is it a combinataion of two or more layers? Is it restricted to some hardware?
Which OSI layer does IPMI belong to?
520 Views Asked by kamasutra At
2
There are 2 best solutions below
0
On
In a nutshell - IPMI is an architecture specification covering much more than one OSI layer.
IPMI is not a single protocol it cannot be strictly classified into particular OSI layer. IPMI request and response may be transferred inside a UDP datagram so it is an application (7th) layer from the TCP/IP stack point of view. Note that TCP/IP has no 5th and 6th layer.
But IPMI can be transferred over completely different transports like I2C, PCI, KCS... IPMI standards defines bridged request / response handling and this kind of operations belong to layer 2 in OSI model.
IPMI's network functionality works on top of UDP, so it's in the OSI 5-7 range. It's a little blurry where it sits as it could be viewed as sitting a bit in all three.
It is restricted to hardware that supports IPMI.