Install Guide

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Overview
Active System Manager (ASM) is Dell’s unified management product that provides a comprehensive
infrastructure and workload automation solution for IT administrators and teams. ASM simplifies and
automates the management of heterogeneous environments, enabling IT to respond more rapidly to
dynamic business needs. IT organizations today are often burdened by complex data centers that contain
a mix of technologies from different vendors and cumbersome operational tasks for delivering services
while managing the underlying infrastructure. These tasks are typically performed through multiple
management consoles for different physical and virtual resources, which can dramatically slow down
service deployment. ASM features an enhanced user interface that provides an intuitive, end-to-end
infrastructure and workload automation experience through a unified console. This speeds up workload
delivery and streamlines infrastructure management, enabling IT organizations to accelerate service
delivery and time to value for customers.
This document contains information about virtual appliance and software requirements of ASM, and the
resources supported by ASM such as chassis, servers, storage, network switches, and adapters.
About this Document
This document version is updated for ASM release 8.2.1.
What’s New in this Release
Active System Manager 8.2.1 is focused on expanding capabilities around workload deployment, adding
new capabilities around managing existing environments, and improving the granularity of information
shown around the current state of environments under management.
The highlights of Active System Manager release 8.2.1 include the following:
Support for Dell Hybrid Cloud Platform with VMware that includes
Discovery, automated deployment and lifecycle management of R730xd based node with H730
PERC controller
Updates to support the latest version of vRealize Automation for enabling ASM VSAN templates to
provision and scale VSAN nodes
Compatibility upgrades for vRealize Automation Suite
ASM plugin updates to support the latest version of VMware vRealize Orchestrator (v7.0.1)
Discontinuing ASM plug-in support for vRealize Orchestrator v5.0 version and following
Enabling Intel NICs to be supported for iSCSI network in a diverged environment
This release also includes compatibility support for the following:
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