Introduction

The Physical Resource Manager is an interactive ArenaCore workspace that allows visual creation and manipulation of physical equipment configuration item structures.

This capability can assist system planners and operations staff during both the design and operations phases of the systems engineering lifecycle.

Physical resource structures are created by selecting Catalog Item representations of desired items from one or more ArenaCore Product Catalogs and dragging them into the visual management canvas of the Physical Resource Manager.

Product Catalogs under ArenaCore are structured to support products from different vendors, meaning that it is possible to develop multi-vendor designs within any single ArenaCore Management Page.

Physical resource structures may be hierarchically complex and contain child resources, such as drive bay assemblies, CPUs, memory, storage, riser, expansion and adaptor card items. The Physical Resource Manager supports inclusion of pre-defined complex products from ArenaCore Product Catalogs. These may range from specific server chassis configurations, through to complete rack scale structures containing compute, storage and network elements.

Physical resources are managed in the context of ‘Management Pages’, which may be thought of as document level items that allow generalised grouping of physical resources.

Management Page ‘documents’ are the basic unit of information handling through the underlying ArenaCore business process management engine, which is responsible for routing actions to individuals having relevant related workflow Roles.

This document describes how to create Physical Resource Management Pages, how to add and manage physical resource items to those pages, and how to take management pages and their associated items through the successive steps related to physical resource life cycle management.