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This chapter contains the following sections:
The Cisco UCS Director Orchestrator (also called the Cisco UCS Director Orchestration Engine, or just Orchestration) enables IT administrators to automate cloud deployment and provisioning and to standardize IT services.
At the scale of cloud computing, manually performing actions such as creating VMs and provisioning networks is prohibitively time-consuming. In Cisco UCS Director, these actions, or tasks, are executable elements that can be run from the GUI. Cisco UCS Director Orchestrator further automates these complex tasks by organizing them into workflows.
Orchestrator works by executing a series of scripted actions called tasks. Each task performs one action. By connecting tasks so that the input of one task is the output of a previous task, you build up a workflow to automate administrative processes such as creating VMs, provisioning baremetal servers, setting up storage, compute, and network resources, and many others.
The following documentation describes how to go further with Cisco UCS Director Orchestrator by using advanced scripting capabilities not covered in this basic guide to Orchestration.
For a description of scripting technologies available in Cisco UCS Director and help choosing the right solution for your application, see the Cisco UCS Director API Customization and Integration Guide.
For an introduction to developing custom tasks, see the Cisco UCS Director Custom Task Getting Started Guide.
For examples of scripts that can be used to customize tasks, see the Cisco UCS Director CloupiaScript Cookbook.
For more information about installing, configuring, and administering Cisco UCS Director, see the guides available at the Cisco UCS Director Product Support Home website.
The following table describes the options that are available on all pages of the application user interface. These options perform the same task on every page.