Patent ID: 8381218

Claim:
A method of collectively managing a plurality of computing entities comprising: at an entity relationship management engine receiving a management scenario comprising: a task block stating tasks to be performed and specifying which of the computing entities the tasks are to be applied to; a dependency block comprising at least one dependency statement to be applied to tasks from the task block, the at least one dependency statement being any of a sequential dependency statement, a dynamic attribute dependency statement, and a synchronization dependency statement; where a sequential dependency statement is a list of at least two tasks to be carried out in a specified order; where a synchronization dependency statement comprises a list of at least two tasks to be started at the same time; and where a dynamic attribute dependency statement comprises at least one task to be carried out on an entity only when a dynamic filter is satisfied on that entity; computing a management plan from the management scenario, the management plan comprising a list of atomic tasks expanded from the tasks in the task block and also comprising binary relations between pairs of tasks calculated from the dependency statement; using the management plan to control execution of the tasks on the entities by scheduling the atomic tasks in a manner which takes into account at least some of the binary relations calculated from the dependency statement.