Install 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 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 8.3.

What’s New in this Release

Active System Manager 8.3 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 8.3 include the following:

Support for Dell Hybrid Cloud for Virtualization that includes a new plug-in for compatibility with vRealize Orchestrator 7.0 and 7.1.

Customers can create workflow that automates the deployment of ASM service templates created in ASM.

This release also includes compatibility support for the following:

• Support for SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 11 SP4 that enables Dell's SAP HANA Cloud Solution to leverage ASM's hardware

compatibility list to offer ASM automation capabilities to customers.

• Support for PowerEdge R630, PowerEdge R730, PowerEdge R730XD hybrid and flash configurations, PowerEdge FC430,

PowerEdge FC630, and PowerEdge FX2- All flash configurations. Customers can leverage ASM capabilities to discover, deploy

and manage the VSAN ready nodes on Virtual SAN 6.2.

Accessing Online Help

ASM online help system provides context-sensitive help available from every page in the ASM user interface.

After you log in to ASM user interface, you can access the online help in any of the following ways:

• To open context-sensitive online help for the active page, click? , and then click Help.