Inventory management
Effective inventory management is crucial for optimizing costs, ensuring resource availability, and maintaining a healthy infrastructure environment. Dell Telecom Infrastructure Automation Suite (Automation Suite) enables you to streamline your inventory processes and make informed decisions. It offers the following:
- Inventory tracking over time—allows you to track inventory changes over time. You can view both active and historical data that are related to your resources. Even deleted data is retained for a specified period, after which it is purged.
- Filtering options—provides powerful filtering capabilities. You can filter inventory data based on specific parameters such as resource model, CPU model, IP address, resource status, resource health, and service tag.
- Virtual service tags—allows you to manually add the identifier that is assigned to your Automation Suite instance. This is used by the Dell Support Team to access support information for your instance when required.
- Resource page insights—provides access to detailed information about compute resources and their components. You can view inventory and hardware details, empowering you to make informed decisions and take appropriate actions.
- Specific monitoring views—offers specific views that are tailored to different aspects of monitoring data. These include:
- Firmware-related details
- BIOS information
- RAID configuration
- Baseboard Management Controller (BMC) details
- CPU metrics
- Memory utilization
- Resource health
- Network Interface Card (NIC) status
- Power Supply Unit (PSU) status
- Platform Security Infrastructure (PSI) details
- Inventory specifics (manufacturer, model)
- Resource planning insights
- Licensing information
- Location details
- Operating System drivers
- Compliance-related data
Integration with secret management systems
You can integrate a third-party secret management system into Automation Suite. During Automation Suite installation, you can enable and configure a secret management server to save sensitive data from each Automation Suite cluster. The secret management system stores only the Automation Suite onboarded server credentials.
Back up and restore
You can take snapshots of the Kubernetes resources and save them in Automation Suite. Backups can be on-demand or scheduled, and are valid for up to thirty days. When you restore the saved backups, the Kubernetes cluster is restored to the backed-up version.
Software development kit
The Automation Suite software development kit (SDK) enables developers and operators to extend and customize the Automation Suite orchestration capabilities. It provides APIs and tools that facilitate the development of blueprints, workflows, and integrations with various technologies and cloud platforms.
License manager
Manage your Automation Suite license through the web user interface and perform functions to upload, activate, view, and download your license. Automation Suite supports trial, pre-production, and production licenses.
Automated hardware profile creation
The iDRAC with a Lifecycle Controller that is integrated with Dell PowerEdge servers allows you to capture system configurations in a human-readable format called a Server Configuration Profile (SCP). This profile can be applied to multiple compute resources, ensuring consistent and efficient settings. Users can download SCP files directly from the iDRAC of the golden server and upload them to the Automation Suite file server, streamlining compute resource cloning. The SCP covers various aspects, including BIOS, NIC, RAID, iDRAC, and Lifecycle Controller settings.
iDRAC Dual Virtual Media Mount support
The iDRAC Dual Virtual Media Mount enables you to install the Red Hat Enterprise Linux operating system on multiple resources simultaneously for a site managed with Automation Suite.
Simplified installation
Release 2.0.1 enables you to install Automation Suite and DTIB-RH with a common installer.
Support for Red Hat Enterprise Linux deployment
Automation Suite can be deployed on the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9.2 operating system.
Support for upgrading firmware and BIOS versions
Automation Suite supports updating the firmware and BIOS versions while onboarding a stand-alone compute resource using APIs. You can also update the firmware and BIOS versions on an existing stand-alone compute resource. Updating the versions while onboarding a stand-alone compute resource is not supported from the web user interface.
Support for role-based access control
User roles such as Global Admin and Global Reader are now available with the required permissions for each user role.
Implementation of Policy Manager
Automation Suite enables you to define rules or policies which can be enforced on the actionable tasks being triggered from Automation Suite.
Download logs
You can use the Automation Suite web user interface to download logs so that you can view them offline. Log files are saved in JSON format and then compressed before being downloaded.
Audit logs
Audit logs are available to review and monitor activities such as administrative tasks, user denials and login errors, and configuration changes. You can download audit logs as a compressed file using the CCP-API or the Automation Suite web user interface.
Log aggregation
Log aggregation records events that are related to services such as: CCP-API, Identity and access management (IAM), Automation Suite web interface, certificate management, storage, management cluster, and worker nodes. Automation Suite collects logs from the nodes and application pods and stores them in the default /home/dell/DTIAS-bundle-<bundle-version>/logs/ directory location of the Automation Suite nodes.
Remote serviceability and support
The Embedded Service Enabler (ESE) in Automation Suite allows connection to the Dell backend through the Secure Connectivity Gateway (SCG) for telemetry and remote serviceability support. The SCG is an aggregator of multiple products from one customer site and is deployed as a virtual machine (VM) external to Automation Suite. This option provides additional functionality that is not offered by the ESE alone.
Data Migration
A data migration path from Automation Suite 1.0 to 2.0.1 is supported.
Validated NIC cards
Additional NIC cards have been validated for use in Automation Suite 2.0.1. For information about the NIC cards, see Supported NIC cards.
Validated Dell PowerEdge servers
Dell PowerEdge Intel® based 16th, 15th, and 14th generation server models have been tested to validate Automation Suite compatibility. For more information about the servers, see Supported hardware components.
NIC bonding
Users of Automation Suite can apply NIC bonding after a Red Hat Enterprise Linux operating system deployment on a managed server to combine multiple network interfaces into a single interface. NIC bonding provides a method to increase the server's bandwidth.
RAID to non-RAID and non-RAID to RAID conversion
You can convert a RAID storage volume to non-RAID. Conversely, you can convert non-RAID storage to RAID storage.
NVMe Storage Support
You can create RAID storage volumes with NVMe drives.
User activity logging
You can create index patterns to view audit logs.
ACC100 card discovery and telemetry
You can now discover an ACC100 card through the Automation Suite inventory. You can collect thermal metrics and enable streaming telemetry for the ACC100 card.