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.
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.
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