Industry terminal definition conventions provide a smooth way for you to send commands from the remote management console--usually Special Administration Console (SAC)-- to the server. These terminal definition conventions ensure a consistent mechanism for managing systems in all states of operation and failure. Windows Server 2003 operating systems use the commands, which are described later in this topic. The firmware, service processors and client terminal software should also use these commands.

The VT100 Terminal Definition is the standard convention used to configure and conduct emergency management tasks with UNIX-based servers. VT100 does not support all keys on the standard PC 101-key layout, however. The VT-UTF8 convention makes available additional keys that are not provided by VT100 for the PC 101 keyboard. With VT-UTF8, you can also use colors and some standardized escape sequences that are commonly used for management tasks. With VT-UTF8, output sent to the serial port can be localized while UNIX interoperability for English is sustained.

VT100+ is a subset of VT-UTF8 that handles only VT100-compatible characters--that is, American National Standards Institute (ANSI) characters 0 through 127. VT-UTF8 is the preferred terminal type for viewing Emergency Management Services output using a terminal emulator, such as HyperTerminal, and for firmware or service processor output. In either case, if VT-UTF8 is not available, your next best choices are to try VT100+ and then VT100, in that order.