User's Manual

1-2 Active System Manager User Guide, Release 7.1
The Active System Manager, enhances the functionality of Active System Manager by providing a more
complete, end-to-end automation solution for both physical and virtual resources. The software enables a
cloud like environment, and support pre-built provisioning templates and custom orchestrated workflows
for a wide range of physical or virtual environments.
It offers the ability to:
• Enhance the discovery and inventory of all components across multiple Active Systems.
• Create and manage the capacity of resources and resource pools spanning multiple systems.
• Simplify adding new or existing infrastructure resources to the resource pools, with an extensive
plug-and-play capability.
• Automate template-based provisioning and de-provisioning of multi-VM workloads (along with the
required virtual networking and storage capabilities).
• Create and publish infrastructure templates.
• Associate multiple custom and flexible orchestrations for end-to-end life cycle management of
workloads.
• Schedule, allocate, and ensure the capacity for complex workloads at current or future times.
• Provide an Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) portal for the IT administrator.
Table 1-1 Features and Benefits
Features Function Benefit
Inventory • Discovery and management of
resources.
• Accelerates the manual and often
laborious process of discovering and
providing an inventory of new
infrastructure.
Automation • Fully automated provisioning of
end-to-end physical and virtual
infrastructure, using a visual
drag-and-drop authoring interface.
• Ensures a solid, high quality foundation
for new workloads.
• Speeds up the deployment of new
infrastructure.
Orchestration • Pre-built and custom-orchestrated
provisioning workflows for fine-grained
control of provisioning methods and
policies, for setup, run-time, and
tear-down.
• Pre-built workflows offer straight
forward guidance based on best
practices.
• Customization offers flexibility required
for unique enterprise needs.
Scheduling and
Allocation
• Advanced scheduling and reservation
system for highly efficient allocation of
resources and guaranteed resource
commitments.
• Ensure business, and in turn their
applications, get prioritized access to
the resources they demand, and pay
for.
• Drive efficiency in the datacenter by
minimizing oversubscription of costly
resources.
Enterprise Integration • LDAP/AD capabilities and role-based
access control for enterprise
management.
• Simple and efficient integration with
enterprise resources.
Capacity Optimization • Unified management of both physical
and virtual resources, along with
capacity-based scheduling capabilities.
• Provides optimized resource allocation
and ensures high asset utilization.