Cisco : Unified Automation – New UCS Management Releases Continue the Journey

Cisco Blog >Data Center

The latest UCS management releases help more than 52,000 customers achieve greater automation and simplification.

The process of automating IT operations and implementing DevOps is a journey. Customers who have implemented Cisco UCS and Cisco HyperFlex have chosen to automate their operations. We're listening to our customers, and they help drive the requirements. As a result, the latest releases of UCS Manager, version 3.1.2, and UCS Central, version 1.5.1, provide many new features to automate, unify, and simplify daily operational activities.

Figure 1: UCS Management Supports the Entire Cisco Portfolio

Staying Unified with UCS

When we introduced the Cisco Unified Computing System (UCS) seven years ago, the goal was to provide a unified means of managing compute, storage and fabric infrastructure resources. We continued to build on this architectural framework with the addition of HyperFlex hyperconverged infrastructure earlier this year, and we've added support for the UCS C3260. The UCS C3260 is a single or dual, x86-based storage server in a chassis with up to 60 drives. It can leverage the automation and benefits of storage profiles, as well as disk zoning between the dual server nodes. Cisco UCS management now also offers chassis profiles and chassis firmware package management.

A storage profile encapsulates the storage requirements for one or more service profiles. Local LUNs configured in a storage profile can be used as boot LUNs or data LUNs. Storage profiles can contain multiple virtual drives, each uniquely assigned to its own disk group (RAID group).

Unified and Simplified

We continue to enhance the HTML 5 user interface (UI) of both UCS Manager and UCS Central Software. The latest release of UCS Central includes significant enhancements to the dashboard and other functions to improve ease of use. This demo video provides an introduction to some of the capabilities.

Figure 2: Example of a UCS Central Dashboard (Click on image for demo video)

Automating at Scale with Simplicity

Some competitive infrastructure management tools offer just a global dashboard. Cisco UCS Central Software offers far more proven capabilities to automate and manage resources on a global scale. These features include:

• Role and policy-based management to ensure security and compliance.
• Centralized keyboard, video, and mouse (KVM) manager to launch KVM sessions anywhere in the Cisco UCS environment.
• Centralized, policy-based firmware upgrades that can be applied globally or selectively through automated schedules or as business workloads demand.
• Hardware compatibility reports that retrieve the latest compatibility information and compare that to your managed configuration to help ensure current or future firmware is compatible.
• Global ID pooling and multidomain ID visibility to eliminate identifier conflicts.
• Global administrative policies that enable both global and local management of Cisco UCS domains and that help ensure consistency and standardization across domains to eliminate configuration drift.

Enhance Automation Using the Ecosystem

UCS management includes integrations with an extensive partner ecosystem consisting of monitoring, analytics, deployment, configuration, and orchestration tools from over 15 ISVs. Your developers can also use the unified API to enhance the value of the Cisco UCS platform using Cisco UCS PowerTool for UCS Manager and the Python Software Development Kit (SDK) to help customize your environment. This allows your organization to leverage your existing tools and policies to implement automation and transition to DevOps at your own pace.

For additional information, checkout the UCS Management web page