1. One or more computer storage media having stored thereon a plurality of instructions that, when executed by one or more processors, causes the one or more processors to perform a method, the method comprising: associating a type, an instance, and one or more configurations with components of a system, each type, instance, and configuration having its own information page corresponding to a particular component, wherein: the type is a general template having corresponding information page that describes the type to which the particular component corresponds; the configuration is a specific template including specific information for a particular class of the type; the instance is a specific occurrence of the type or the configuration and corresponding to the particular component; information contained in information page associated with the instance is more specific or restrictive than the information contained in information pages associated with the configuration, unless instructed otherwise by a user; and information contained in information page associated with the configuration is more specific or restrictive than the information contained in information pages associated with the type, unless instructed otherwise by the user; associating one or more information pages with components of the system to define a model of the system, wherein: each component comprises at least one of: an application, a particular hardware on a computer, a virtual machine, a computer, or a group of multiple computers; each information page represents a specification for an associated component, each information page comprising at least two of following distinct pages: a policy page, an installation page, a constraint page, a monitoring page a service level agreement page, or a description page, the model defines one or more relationships among the components, the relationships including: a containment relationship; a hosting relationship; or a communication relationship; and the model supports deployment of a plurality of policies, wherein each policy applies to a subset of the system such that a system component affected by a first policy is not affected by a second policy; associating two or more policies with particular components based on the information in a policy page associated with the particular components, the two or more policies comprising: a software deployment policy; a software configuration management policy; a data protection policy; an inventory data policy; a health monitoring policy; a workload deployment policy; or a task execution policy; making the model accessible to various utilities or other applications involved in managing the system; receiving an identification of a change to one of the policies; identifying appropriate components of the model to which the changed policy applies; associating the changed policy with the identified appropriate components of the model; and invoking a deployment agent to apply the changed policy to the identified appropriate components of the system associated with the parts of the model.