Users Guide

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Overview
Active System Manager (ASM) is Dell’s unied management product that provides a comprehensive infrastructure and workload
automation solution for IT administrators and teams. ASM simplies 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 dierent vendors and
cumbersome operational tasks for delivering services while managing the underlying infrastructure. These tasks are typically
performed through multiple management consoles for dierent physical and virtual resources, which can dramatically slow down
service deployment.
ASM features a user interface that provides an intuitive, end-to-end infrastructure and workload automation experience through a
unied console. This speeds up workload delivery and streamlines infrastructure management, enabling IT organizations to accelerate
service delivery and time to value for customers.
What can you do with ASM?
ASM provides capabilities and benets that allow organizations to:
• Accelerate IT service delivery by automating and centralizing key operational functions like workload and infrastructure
deployment.
• Free up IT sta to focus on higher priority projects by dramatically reducing manual steps and human touch points.
• Use infrastructure more fully and eciently by pooling available server, storage and network resources that you can schedule
for future use or allocate on demand.
• Standardize workload delivery processes to ensure accuracy and consistency for initial deployment, while maintaining the
exibility to scale workloads according to business needs.
• Maximize investments in both Dell and Non-Dell IT resources with support for heterogeneous IT environments.
How is ASM dierent?
ASM helps you realize these benets through a unique set of features and capabilities designed for IT administrators. These
capabilities include:
• Template-based provisioning and orchestration — Simplify IT service delivery with a centralized approach for capturing and
applying workload-specic conguration and best practices; plus step-by-step denition and execution of tasks across the
workload lifecycle.
• Infrastructure lifecycle management — Easily manage the entire infrastructure lifecycle with:
– Fast discovery, inventory, and initial conguration of assets.
– 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 simplied management — Powerful and intuitive user interface that makes it easy to set up, deploy, and manage your
IT environment and enables simplied integration with third-party tools.
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