Reference Guide

Overview

This document is intended for a technical audience. It is assumed that the reader is familiar with REST,

and programmatic interaction with REST APIs. In reality, any programming languages can be used with

these APIs, however, the code examples contained in this guide are written in Ruby. XML is also used

extensively for these examples.

Dell Active System Manager (ASM) is an acronym for Dell Active System Manager. ASM is intended to

automate the processes involved in provisioning, configuring, and managing bare metal hardware:

chassis, servers, switches, and network storage devices. ASM supports processes such as automated

discovery of hardware, automated installation of operating systems, creation of virtual networks, and

firmware management.

Two essential concepts in ASM are, ServiceTemplate and Deployment process. A ServiceTemplate

describes a blueprint for provisioning and configuring a collection of devices as a named unit, also known

as a Service. Deployment is the process of utilizing a ServiceTemplate to physically realize what service

the ServiceTemplate describes. While the names Deployment and Service are synonymous, ASM-UI uses

the term Service while the REST API uses the term Deployment.

ASM is distributed as a virtual appliance running a collection of interacting web applications that

communicate through the REST interfaces. An additional web application, ASM-UI, also residing on the

appliance, provides full browser-based GUI access to ASM. This ASM-UI interacts with ASM through the

same REST interfaces described in this guide.

It is possible to effectively integrate ASM with any custom UI or access it through programs for better

automation experiences.

In this API guide, we have described how to use these APIs with appropriate examples.

A full reference to all of the available REST methods is explained in Appendix A.

NOTE: Most of these REST methods exchange complex data models within the HTTP requests and

responses, which can be represented as either XML or JSON depending on the preference. The

structure of these models is contained in Appendix B for further reference.