Setup 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 8.1.1.
What’s New in this Release
Active System Manager release 8.1.1 is an update of release 8.1 that consists primarily of additions to the
compatibility matrix in support of Dell Blueprints and Reference Architectures, as well as a new plugin for
VMware vRealize Orchestrator that uses the Applications Programming Interface (API) introduced earlier
with ASM release 8.1.
The highlights of Active System Manager release 8.1.1 include the following:
• A new Active System Manager plugin to VMware vRealize Orchestrator (vRO), which enables ASM
template deployment, scaling, and deprovisioning to be called from vRO orchestration workflows, or
published to the vRealize Automation (vRA) service catalog.
• Performance improvements to most of the ASM web application pages.
• Compatibility matrix additions, including those detailed below, to support the Dell Blueprint Reference
Architectures, including select reference architectures for the Virtualization, Cloud, and Unified
Communications and Collaboration Blueprints.
Accessing Online Help
ASM online help system provides context-sensitive help available from every page in ASM user interface.
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