Users Guide

– Full lifecycle management of physical and virtual infrastructure and workloads.
• Deep virtualization integration — Manage cluster-level and virtual machine (VM) lifecycle.
• Resource pooling and dynamic allocation — Optimize capital expenditures by creating and
managing physical and virtual IT resource pools.
• Radically simplified management — Powerful and intuitive user interface that makes it easy to set up,
deploy, and manage your IT environment and enables simplified integration with third-party tools.
• Open and extensible — An architecture that integrates with the IT of today and tomorrow; this means
being able to plug a new solution into your existing architecture, as well as giving you flexibility in the
future to adopt new technical innovations.
ASM makes it easy to automate IT service delivery and to manage your IT environment end-to-end. You
can improve and accelerate service and infrastructure delivery, maximize efficiency across your IT service
lifecycle, and consistently achieve high-quality IT services.
About this document
This document version is updated for ASM release 8.2.
What’s New in this Release
Active System Manager 8.2 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 include the following:
• Open Platform Support that includes:
– Application module SDK and multi-application support
– Architectural work to support modularity and to enable a plug-in SDK framework for resource
modules, starting with the application level.
– Creating Puppet-based application modules and importing the modules in the ASM templates.
• Improved user interface.
• Expanded infrastructure and service level monitoring:
– Infrastructure health monitoring includes chassis, servers, I/O modules, storage devices, and
networking devices.
– Service health provides an aggregated view based on services deployed to provide a window into
service level health.
• Port view virtualization
– A graphical view that provides a mapping of physical to virtual infrastructure and clear notification
of connectivity issues.
• Brownfield support to facilitate installing ASM into the existing environment
– Includes support for importing existing ESXi hosts and clusters as ASM resources, and the ability
use them without requiring ASM to have originally provisioned them. It also enables key features
including infrastructure level health and firmware updates.
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