Platform Emulators
The best way to get oriented and familiar with Cisco UCS Manager and Cisco UCS Central, while minimizing risk, is to take advantage of the Platform Emulators.
The Platform Emulators (PE) run as virtual machines, yet are complete instances of Cisco UCS Manager and Cisco UCS Central. They maintain the Cisco UCS management information tree, and data management engine. They support the use of the Cisco UCS XML API. In addition, you can import both the physical hardware configuration and the logical configuration of an actual Cisco UCS domain.
With the PE, Cisco UCS administrators can effectively model their entire Cisco UCS environment. You can use a sandbox to configure all changes, testing, and everything else, without any impact to the actual production domain. You can also use modeling to facilitate a formal change management sign-off for Cisco UCS Central training.
For testing any integration with Cisco UCS Central, ensure that you use the latest version of the PE.