Dell Active System Manager
Active System Manager (ASM) is Dell’s unified management and open automation solution that integrates with the IT of today and tomorrow. With its open, flexible, and extensible architecture, and support for heterogeneous IT environments, ASM empowers IT teams to unify existing IT investments and maintain the flexibility to adopt new technology to support new business initiatives in the future.
ASM takes a top-down service-centric approach that radically simplifies the deployment, provisioning, and management of IT services, and enables any IT administrator to provision new infrastructure and workloads in just minutes. ASM’s automation spans across both physical and virtual infrastructure and encompasses everything from servers, switches, and storage, to hypervisors and clusters, to virtual machines, operating systems, and applications – all from a profoundly intuitive user interface that simplifies what are otherwise highly complex and time-consuming tasks.
ASM is an important foundation of Dell’s private cloud solutions, provides unified management for converged infrastructure solutions, and will make our Dell reference architectures come to life with template-based automation for rapid and repeatable deployments.
For information, videos, and additional resources on ASM, please see the links below in this page.
ASM 8.2
With its newest release, Active System Manager continues to expand on ASM’s intuitive user interface and its open and extensible architecture.
ASM 8.2 introduces the following capabilities:
- ASM 8.2 includes an Application Software Developer Kit (SDK) and some new additions to the ASM compatibility list, broadening the scope of infrastructure and applications that can take advantage of ASM’s powerful automation capabilities.
- A new user interface improves on ASM’s already intuitive navigation and comprehensive dashboard view of IT resources
- A port view capability provides visual mapping of physical to virtual infrastructure and clear notification of connectivity issues for faster root cause identification and resolution.
- Expanded infrastructure and service-level health monitoring gives IT administrators an aggregated view into service-level health, helping them to be proactive in dealing component failures that could impact running services
- Building on ASM’s existing integrations with VMware vCenter and vRealize Orchestrator, starting with release 8.2, ASM will be adding increasing capabilities for VMware Virtual SAN
- ASM 8.2 includes support for VMware Virtual SAN 6.1 for our recently announced VSAN-ready nodes based on the Dell PowerEdge RX730XD. This will dramatically reduce the number of steps required for customers and partners to get a cluster up and running and to maintain consistent firmware levels.
- ASM 8.2 also adds support for discovery and lifecycle management of pre-existing infrastructure (on the ASM compatibility list) in VMWare ESXi environments
- The ASM compatibility list continues to grow giving customers the ability to manage even more of their IT resources with ASM.
You can read more details on ASM 8.2 release here.
ASM 8.1.1
With its newest release, Active System Manager continues to deliver on ecosystem enablement by releasing an integration for VMware’s vRealize suite. This integration comes in the form of a plugin to VMware vRealize Orchestrator. It enables key workflows delivering a truly elastic data center spanning from physical infrastructure provisioning to self-service workload and VM deployment with VMware vRealize Automation.
Read more here for details of the ASM 8.1.1 release.
In addition to ecosystem enablement, this release also aligns ASM with key Dell Blueprints such as virtualization, Cloud, and UC&C. ASM easily imports then deploys reference architecture templates automating the provisioning and configuration of server, network and storage infrastructure. In particular, ASM is a key component in the new DellHybridCloudPlatformReferenceArchitecture ValidateSystemforVirtualization with VMware vRealize.
Finally, key compatibility expansion includes PowerEdge platforms FC830 and FC430 designed for our FX2 converged architecture, the Dell S4048-ON switch, the SCv2000 storage, and VMware’s vSphere 6.0.
ASM 8.1
The recent ASM 8.1 release continued to expand the functionality and the openness of the ASM automation platform by releasing the ASM Application Programming Interface (API), enabling the full capability of the system to be accessed programmatically for integration into customer environments and third-party solutions. In addition to the API, ASM 8.1 introduced expanded server and storage configuration capabilities, template portability, seamless upgrades, and more. For all the details on ASM 8.1, read the Dell TechCenter post here.
You can view the Dell4Enterprise blog post announcing ASM 8.1 here.
A new video that shows how ASM 8.1 simplifies and automates IT operations can be viewed here.
In the ASM 8.1 release, new benchmark testing was also performed to characterize the speed and efficiency delivered by ASM. This testing showed that ASM lets you deploy a new IT service from a template in just 6 steps and as little as 25 seconds of hands-on administrator time! And compared to the equivalent Cisco solution, with ASM you can deploy new infrastructure in 80% less time and with 71% fewer steps. For all the details, read the test report here.
ASM User Interface
Active System Manager features a unified dashboard that shows the health and status of deployed services along with the used and available resources. ASM employs a graphical template builder that enables administrators to easily define automation tasks, leveraging pre-built resource modules and sample templates.
ASM Dashboard and Template Builder Interfaces
Benefits of ASM
Active System Manager brings profound speed, simplicity, and openness to the management of today's complex IT environments, allowing IT administrators to:
- Accelerate growth & innovation with fast and responsive IT automation
- Speed up time to production with automated onboarding, configuration and deployment
- Eliminate time-consuming steps and minimize risk through template-based automation
- Respond quickly and avoid disruption by easily scaling resources on the fly
- Optimize IT operations by simplifying and unifying enterprise systems management
- Lower your operating costs through more efficient use of IT resources
- Reduce errors and manage your environment efficiently with a unified console and highly intuitive interface
- Simplify complex infrastructure and workload deployments with reusable automation templates
- Increase agility with an open and heterogeneous architecture
- Build and deploy converged solutions that are tailored to your needs with an open and flexible automation tool
- Ensure investment protection with support for current and future IT resources, including Dell and third-party
- Integrate ASM into VMware & Microsoft environments to add powerful capabilities for building your private cloud
All in all, Dell Active System Manager accelerates innovation with fast IT automation, reduces risks by unifying enterprise systems management, and future-proofs your environment with an open and extensible architecture.
ASM Resources
For more information on ASM, please see the other articles in this ASM wiki, and check out the following resources:
- Active System Manager Web Page
- Active System Manager Spec Sheet (PDF)
- Build the Foundation for Your Private Cloud with Active System Manager (PDF)
- Article on Service-Centric Approach to IT Automation (PDF)
- Competitive Test Report and Infographic (PDFs)
- Active System Manager 8.2 Documentation (PDFs)
ASM Videos
- Automate Systems management with Active System Manager
- Simplifying IT Operations with Active System Manager
- ASM Faster and More Efficient than Cisco UCS Solution
- Self-Help Video Series
ASM REST API
Click here to access the ASM REST API documentation. API code samples are also available here.
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