Version 2026.1 Release Notes#

Version History/Revision History#

This is the Release Notes for Edge Manageability Framework version 2026.1, released June 15th 2026.

Note

This document refers to Edge Manageability Framework as the “Product”.

Release Highlights#

Edge Manageability Framework (EMF) enables you to securely onboard and provision remote edge devices to a central management plane. Edge Node software provides infrastructure software configuration profiles that are provisioned onto onboarded nodes. The 2026.1 release supports two deployment workflows: Edge Infrastructure Manager (EIM) and vPRO. Application Orchestration and Cluster Orchestration are not supported in this release.

Key highlights of the 2026.1 release include:

Infrastructure and Edge Node Software

  • New: Added support for provisioning clusters independently of the Cluster Orchestrator (CO) for testing, development, and specialised use cases that do not require full CO management capabilities. Clusters provisioned this way will not appear in the CO dashboard, but their configurations remain bundled with host configuration and accessible through orch-cli commands. For full provisioning steps, see Provisioning Clusters Without the Cluster Orchestrator.

Edge Manageability Framework Platform Enhancements

  • New: Replaced ArgoCD and Gitea-based deployment with a Helmfile-based deployment model. The new pre-orch.sh and post-orch-deploy.sh scripts manage cluster setup and Helm chart lifecycle independently of the Cluster Orchestrator (CO) and Application Orchestrator (AO).

  • New: Added pre-orch-backup.sh script for pre-upgrade backup of PostgreSQL data and Kubernetes secrets, consumed automatically by post-orch-deploy.sh upgrade.

  • New: Introduced two deployment profiles via EOM_HELMFILE_ENV: onprem-eim (full Edge Infrastructure Manager) and onprem-vpro (AMT out-of-band only, reduced footprint).

Out-of-Band Device Management

Serial‑over‑LAN (SOL) and Keyboard‑Video‑Mouse (KVM) enabled through Intel® Active Management Technology (AMT), provided the target system is vPro®‑enabled and provisioned.

  • SOL (Serial Over LAN) Support

    SOL provides a managed text-based console redirection. It is primarily used for troubleshooting at the BIOS level or when the operating system is in a command-line state.

    Function: It redirects the serial character stream from the remote device to your management console over the network.

    Best For: Accessing BIOS/UEFI settings, interacting with Linux terminal consoles, or viewing BSOD/boot-loader text.

  • KVM (Keyboard, Video, Mouse) Support

    KVM is the “Remote Desktop” equivalent for out-of-band management. Unlike software-based tools (like TeamViewer), Intel AMT KVM works at the hardware level.

    Function: It allows you to see the screen and control the input of a remote system during the entire boot process, including BIOS and OS loading.

    Requirements: KVM is only available on Intel vPro® Enterprise platforms. It is generally not available on “Standard Manageability” or “Entry” versions of AMT.

    Usage: https://docs.openedgeplatform.intel.com/edge-manage-docs/dev/user_guide/set_up_edge_infra/orch_cli/orch_cli_guide.html

  • For Intel® AMT or Intel® Standard Manageability issues see Intel® vPro® Power Management.

Upgrades from Previous Releases#

Breaking Change Notice Upgrading from EMF 2026.0 to 2026.1 introduces a breaking change as we shifted from argocd to helm based approach for deployment. This change requires a complete reinstallation of the product, which includes deleting and re-provisioning all edge nodes. Please plan accordingly for this upgrade process.

The codebase is Apache software version 2.0 licensed and available on the Github repository.

For a detailed list of features, see the Overview page and the Edge Out-of-Band Manageability README file.

Known Issues#

The following are known issues in the release. While several known issues and limitations have been addressed during the 2026.1 release cycle, some have been carried over from past releases.

  • The lenovo profile is not supported in this release. If you have a lenovo profile, please switch to the onprem-eim profile and re-provision the edge node.

EMF deployment#

Device Provisioning#

  • If Out-of-Tree (OOT) driver installation with secure boot option enabled fails because of secure boot password request on the edge node hardware, reboot the edge node hardware.

  • If the edge node reboots during the full-disk encryption (FDE) stage, the edge node will try and boot to disk but will then fail because of partial encryption. The workaround is to delete the host from Edge Out-of-Band Manageability UI and CLI and then re-provision.

  • If there are network issues during initial provisioning of the edge node, see Recover from Edge Node Initialization or Provisioning Failed.

  • If an edge node fails to boot properly during initial provisioning, see Boot to Hard Disk OS after Edge Node Provision.

  • Occasionally, logging and metrics are not enabled during deployment. This might be because the Docker software pull limit is reached. First, delete the edge node (see Delete Host) and then re-provision it with a different IP address.

  • If several edge nodes are provisioned at the same time from a non-premium Docker account, there is a limit of 100 pulls per IP over a four-hour window. In this case, upgrade to the premium account or wait to provision more edge nodes.

User Experience#

  • Let’s Encrypt certificates and Certificate Authority (CA) are deployed by default. Let’s Encrypt poses an issue where if the Certificate Authority is changed, the edge nodes will not trust the Edge Out-of-Band Manageability (EOM) anymore. In such a case, you must reinstall the edge nodes. Advanced users can use their different CAs, therefore avoiding this issue.

  • Telemetry Orchestrator services (OpenTelemetry and Mimir) do not have role-based access authorization enabled in the southbound interfaces towards the edge node.

  • If the Product and Keycloak solution are restarted separately or if there is a Keycloak signing key rotation, the Product returns error 403. The workaround is to log out, close the browser, and wait approximately 15 minutes and then log back in and retry; the request should succeed as soon as the Product refreshes the new signing keys from Keycloak solution, which happens periodically and automatically.

  • The querying capabilities of Mimir on orchestrator-observability and edgenode-observability may occasionally fail due to loss of communication between querier and query-frontend. The workaround is a restart of querier pod.

  • Users created in Keycloak solution must have email address set up to properly perform authentication to Grafana Observability Dashboards. Users without email set won’t be able to access metrics and logs via Grafana UI.

Limitations#

The following are known limitations in this release.

Provisioning Limitations#

  • An edge node cannot be re-provisioned from scratch if it is not deleted first from the user interface. Follow the steps in Delete Host and then re-provision the edge node.

  • You cannot perform an initial boot behind a proxy server because the Original Equipment Manufacturer (OEM) BIOS does not support HTTPs booting behind a proxy server. After you have installed the OS, you can boot behind a proxy server. Alternatively, use USB boot.

  • The embedded JSON Web Token (JWT) in the EMT (Hook OS replacement) is programmed to expire after a maximum of 60 minutes. If there is a delay in supplying the login details, the OS provisioning process may fail, which is the expected behavior. In such cases, the user must initiate the re-provisioning of the edge node.

Hosts and Infrastructure Limitations#

  • GPU support: GPU metrics collection is not supported yet.

  • You can create two sites with the same name under two different regions, although this does not cause the nodes to be present when creating clusters. Intel recommends that sites have unique, non-overlapping names.

  • If Vpro Activation exceeds 2-3 minutes, the host will start displaying an error state. However, it will subsequently recover to a healthy status once activation completed. Refer to Intel® vPro® Power Management

Multi-tenancy Limitations#

  • Users should be added to no more than 20 projects. If the observability features are not used, then this limit may be raised to 40 projects. Exceeding these limits may lead to errors with tokens or headers being too large. These limits may be mitigated by creating multiple users and partitioning the projects across them such that no user has more than 20 projects.

User Experience Limitations#

  • The Show All page size for hosts does not work for lists over 100. If you have a list of more than 100 hosts in a view, do not set the page size to larger than 100.

  • Scheduling a recurring maintenance to happen on the last day of the month before midnight in a timezone that is behind GMT/UTC, when the schedule is after midnight in GMT/UTC causes the maintenance to be scheduled on the 1st of the selected month instead of the next month. For example, if you schedule a maintenance to repeat every May 31st at 9 pm PDT, the maintenance will repeat on May 1st at 9 pm instead of on June 31st. When scheduling, be aware of the time zone.

  • The “Total Provisioning Time” metric is only available for approximately 15 days since a node was provisioned.

Recommendations#

  • Users need to maintain fixed IP reservations for each edge node using address-to-MAC mapping in their DHCP server for stable functioning of the edge node cluster.

  • Intel advises against scheduling a major OS upgrade. Intel only supports the current Product version on Ubuntu OS 24.04 LTS.

  • Wait for some time after the initial Product installation or a full restart before provisioning nodes because there are a few components (for example, DKAM and Tinkerbell pods) that take about 15 minutes to get to the ready state.

  • Wait for some time after the initial Product installation or a complete system reboot before provisioning nodes. This is because certain components, such as DKAM and Tinkerbell pods, need approximately 15 minutes to reach the ready state.

Documentation#

The Product has complete online documentation.

You can find the online documentation at https://docs.openedgeplatform.intel.com/edge-manage-docs/main/index.html

System Requirements#

You can find the system requirements on the System Requirements page.