Users Guide

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 a 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.

What can you do with ASM?

ASM provides capabilities and benefits that allow organizations to:

• Accelerate IT service delivery by automating and centralizing key operational functions like workload and infrastructure

deployment.

• Free up IT staff to focus on higher priority projects by dramatically reducing manual steps and human touch points.

• Use infrastructure more fully and efficiently 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

flexibility 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 different?

ASM helps you realize these benefits 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-specific configuration and best practices; plus step-by-step definition and execution of tasks across the

workload lifecycle.

• Infrastructure lifecycle management — Easily manage the entire infrastructure lifecycle with:

– Fast discovery, inventory, and initial configuration 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 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.