Cisco IMM Configuration Policy and Profile Best Practices

Hello everyone. Welcome to the experts inside series on Cisco IMM configuration policy and profile best practices. I'm Sandeep Kumar, you're host for the.00:10Today our inter site experts Joe Francis and Ellen Clark will take you through the sessions best practices. Joe is a Cisco customer success specialist focused on data center compute containers, infrastructure as code and hybrid cloud technologies.00:21Joe brings a history of using and deploying Cisco core edge and cloud infrastructure in production IT operation environments for over 20 years, both as an engineer and as a manager. Alan has over 22 years of experience working with enterprise data center technologies.00:38As a member of various organizations within Cisco. Alan has worked with hundreds of customers on implementation and support of compute and storage products.00:58Alan Holds a bachelor's degree in computer science from North Carolina State University and is a dual Cisco certified Internet expert on storage networking and data center. For our Q and A session, we'll be.01:08Utilizing Slido to collect your questions, you may submit them directly through the Slido widget integrated into Webex. Alternatively, you can also scan the QR code or visit slido.com and enter the enter enter the passcode as iMM-config.01:28And that will take you to the, the Q and A section or the Slido polls. Now we have come out to our 1st Slido question of the series. Again, please use the Slido widget in the Webex or you can directly go.01:46To Slido.com or scan the QR code.02:06To code and find this. Now the question is, where are you joining from today? So we'll love to hear back from you guys from where which part of the world you guys are joining us today. We'll give it a minute for everyone to respond back and I'll I'll share the Slido poll in a second.02:09Okay let me I still see P.02:30So typing, so I'm going to.02:50So far we see only one person has responded back and that person is from North Carolina. Okay, we got one more from Austin Texas. That's good to know.03:15Thank you for sharing this thank you all for sharing where you're joining from. It's great to see different locations.03:37Regardless of your physical location, the goal of our session today is to show you how to centralize your management plane. With inter site you can effectively oversee your infrastructure from anywhere reducing the need for physical presence in the data center.03:55Now that brings us to our next question give me 1 s.04:15Oh have you configured policy or profiles using inter site? Again, please use the Slido panel to.04:31Provide this response, and I'm going to share the response in a second.04:50Okay, so we got around 75 % people who have already done this and 25 person folks who.05:24Have not done this. So that's good to know. For those familiar with intercite, I hope you'll find some advanced steps to refine your workflows, and for those newer to the platform, we will walk through the configuration steps clearly so you can see how these policies reduce manual tasks and improve consistency across your.05:40Now with that, I'm going to hand this over to you Joe. All right, very good. Welcome everyone. Good morning, good afternoon, good evening. Give me 1 s. I'll get my screen situated.06:04And then we can begin our presentation I've shared the, the deck jobs you can proceed with this. Great, ok.06:24So in today's discussion, as you can see, we're going to discuss the main topic of today, which is inter site managed mode. We're gonna begin with the 1st step of introducing inter site managed mode to you. Hopefully you've had experience with it.06:40Or had some other technical training or at least right up on it. And next we're going to have a session around enabling inter site managed mode. How you go from regular inter site to inter site managed mode.06:57And it's gonna revolve around your fabric interconnects that you have there on site. And lastly, we're going to explain some of the best practices surrounding inter site managed mode, some things you will want to do.07:12Not tips and tricks, but rather things you want to integrate into your implementation of inter site managed mode from day one. So those are gonna be very important, do not overlook those. All right, next slide please.07:28Here we're part of introducing IMM or inter site managed mode, and we have a visual representation here of inter site managed mode. At the top. I'll draw your attention to the cloud there that says Cisco intersight.07:45Circle.08:05And that is gonna represent all the the upstream of the way that you implement Intersight in your environment. Now beneath that with the orange outline around it, we have what Intersight will do for you in.08:06In three different ways there. So you've got three verticals, each has a blue dot.08:26In a slightly darker blue.and one says operations and the other says configurations here. Let me see if I can, nope, can add a pointer. So I'll draw your eye to the top right in the the darker blue.in the orange.08:31Outline and that will represent the operations that Cisco Intersight can do for you. This is going to include visibility and monitoring.08:49As far as real time and historical visibility into the health and status of your global infrastructure, this can include Cisco or does include Cisco and can include 3rd party servers via their capability in using the Redfish protocol because Redfish protocol.09:04It's introduced exclusively with Cisco Intersight managed mode. And that goes for 3rd party servers, storage or other network devices. And the view there for your visibility and monitoring is gonna provide a consolidated dashboard.09:24We'll see that in a later demo by my good friend Alan, and it's gonna allow you to to customize pieces of that dashboard, firmed widgets in inter site speak, and it's gonna let you monitor your inventory health, your alarms, your contract status, and your performance metrics.09:42Sticking with the operations that Intersight can do for you too, also going to follow the health and performance monitoring of your environment that's going to be continuous and allow you to do proactive support capabilities.10:02Such as automatically open some rmas for you, make it a lot easier using the connected TAC functionality to open the TAC case when and where you need to. Another operational feature there is going to be represented by the audit request in compliance.10:17Needs that you have there. So e.g., Intersight can record audit logs for your environment, handle the session management as far as the timeouts, number of concurrent sessions, and operational requests. And the last part of the operations there is the monitor.10:37Feature that's gonna bring you the notifications and integrations. If you haven't had experience yet with regular inter site inter site managed mode, keeps that and it's going to give you the ability to set up email notifications and alarms based on the status of your environment.10:55Now, if you move slide to the left there, the configuration, the, the lighter blue.the configuration part there is gonna be made up of the configuration and orchestration capabilities of Cisco Intersight. I believe that's covered more deeply in another series.11:13That welcome you to join. We'll see lists list of those at the end as well as you'll get a link on how to register for those upcoming sessions. Another configuration item there is is the operational task and workflow execution.11:32Again covered more elaborately in a different export insights series that I invite you to attend. Another configuration item represents the customization and policy management.11:50That Cisco Intersight managed mode brings to the table. Intersight managed mode is going to keep those policies globally available by keeping those in Cisco Intersight and they would not reside on the Fabric interconnects.12:06As they may have previously UCS managed environment. Last one is the maintenance and troubleshooting tools that are available in the configuration via Cisco Intersight. That's gonna allow you to perform ongoing maintenance, troubleshooting.12:22Then make some operational adjustments to your environment. With that being said, that was the ingredients of the blue.and the slightly darker blue.at the top. We see that represented in three different verticals.12:40And this chart is meant to let you focus on those and I'll switch and draw your eye to the bottom of the screen. We'll see IMM or inter site managed mode in the far right. In the middle, we'll see inter site standalone mode.12:55Or ISM and on the far left we'll see UCSM managed mode or UCM. Now, if today's topic is on inter site managed mode so we can focus on that.13:11These are all just three different approaches for you to manage, operate and configure your UCS infrastructure. IMM uses Intersight for centralized management of your fabric interconnects and associated servers.13:29While relies on the traditional Cisco UCS manager, it's running directly on the Fabric interconnects themselves. ISM in the middle there applies to any standalone C series servers where there are NO fis present in the environment.13:45That they're gonna be managed directly by Cisco Intersight. An example of the m or the UCS managed mode is where you've got some B series servers or C series servers, and they're all connected to fabric interconnects, and they utilize.14:01The local UCS manager interface. If you look at the top of that stack, you can see Cisco Intersight has the darker blue circle circled or surrounded, and that indicates that Cisco Intersight is gonna be able to take care of the operational aspect.14:21Of those servers. However, the lighter blue circle is not encompassed. Therefore, the configuration is still gonna reside in your local fabric interconnects when you're running in UCS manager mode. Intersight standalone mode.14:38As we said, that's managed directly by Cisco Intersight, there's NO fabric interconnects available. And on the far right column there in inter site managed mode, you'll see that an example, these are managing Cisco X series, a chassis.14:57With the fabric interconnect and the Fabric interconnects are running in Intersight managed mode and all of the policy profiles configurations are handled through the top of that stack there Cisco Intersight.15:12And I'll leave that for this slide if you would, next slide please. Now here we see some of the benefits of the inter site managed mode model. We'll see on the left, we have modernized.15:31And IMM significantly enhances the feature velocity with CICD by leveraging its cloud based SaaS platform and that SaaS platform of Intersight is gonna follow a continuously continuous delivery model.15:46To ensure that you have regular updates and feature enhancements that's gonna need or eliminate the need for upgrades in your underlying UCS code that you have to partake, gonna allow you quicker access to new features and fixes.16:05And by hosting UCS manager functionality within Cisco Intersight, any feature rollouts are gonna be separated from firmware updates. That's gonna contribute to a faster future delivery.16:24Now, the benefits there, as we said, improved code quality, reduced deployment risk and increased efficiency. Imm's modern API is based on the OP Open API framework.16:40And that's gonna facilitate integration with any current CICD tools that you are currently working with. Redfus standard, as we mentioned before, that comes with.16:57Implementation of Cisco Intersight managed mode exclusively. Bed Fish is an open industry's tender specification and that is gonna be built into the integrated management controller or IMC.17:13In each of your Cisco servers, you allow you to manage standalone UCSC servers and more proudly into Intersight managed mode for managing UCS fabric interconnected systems. Now redfice itself.17:28It does provide a restful API using JSON and OData. That's going to enable automation and simplify the integration of Cisco UCS equipment into your existing toolchains.17:43Now if we look at the center column there, simplify, inter site managed mode is a new architecture, as we said. It's gonna unify the management experience for your Cisco UCS fabric interconnected systems and any standalone servers.18:04Going to merge local and global service profiles and templates into a key feature centralized source of inter site managed mode that will let you simplify your management overall.18:20And enable consistency across your multiple UCS domains. Now the policy model of inter site managed mode is gonna be a simplified version.18:35Which should be a key benefit to you, particularly if you're transitioning away from UCS manager and UCS central environments. Lastly, if we look at the safer operations column there on the far right.18:52You'll see that inter site managed mode is gonna help you leverage your policies, your server profiles, and there is a transition tool, inter site managed mode transition tool that you can use to make sure that you get a consistent configuration.19:11Across all of your UCS domains from your previous UCS manager domains. All of that's gonna help you reduce errors, streamline your deployments, and simplify the management of complex environments that you might have.19:28Now as far as decoupling the firmware and software features while a complete decoupling is not fully realized yet, Cisco Intersight managed mode is demonstrating a clear movement towards that and giving you modularity and independent management of your key firmware components.19:49Particularly through the use of bundle images and the separate management capabilities of the Cisco integrated management console. Next we've got improved change control with assign and deploy options.20:08Let's go inter site managed mode, utilizes an assign, and also a deploy action that are separate within your server profile deployment that's gonna let you manage changes to your physical servers.20:26Now these actions are crucial for applying configuration changes and ensuring servers are in the desired state that you have set up for them. Now the last one is better policy scale.20:42Intersight managed mode offers significant advantages in terms of policy scale compared to former UCS manager environments primarily by not being limited by fabric interconnect resources. IMM is gonna empower you.21:01They have greater policy scale, leverage cloud based intelligence processing power of Cisco Intersight. This enables administrators to manage policies and infrastructure more effectively, efficiently, and a much larger scale than previously possible if you were running UCS manager.21:19All right, we'll move to our next slide here. With this slide we see the individual components at makeup inter site managed mode. You can see that we've got on the left there, domain profile.21:41In the center, we'll look at the chassis profile, and on the right, we'll look at the server profile. Go under the domain profile on the left, this will be how you configure fabric interconnects through some reusable policies because you.21:59You said inter site managed mode.22:19And this is where you'll configure your ports, port channels, as well as your VLANs and your vsans or your particular network. Also where you'd have your NTP.22:20Your syslog settings, QoS policies, e.g., all under your domain profile. If we move to that middle column for chassis profile.22:40This is where it's gonna enable you to create and associate your chassis policy to an inter site managed mode claimed chassis. So when a chassis profile is associated, your IMM automatically configures the chassis to match the configuration specified in your.22:55Policy of the chassis profile. And then on the far right, if we look at our individual server profiles, this is where you will enable resource management and streamline policy alignment and server configurations.23:15You can create new server profiles using the server profile wizard, which should save you some time and steps and ensure consistency. You don't want to go that route, you can actually import the configuration details of an existing server.23:32C series server that's in standalone mode, as well as those are FI attached in inter site managed mode. That's gonna let you eliminate some of the failures caused by inconsistent configurations.23:49Across your environment. Now some of the policies there that you want to think about when you when you're thinking of these profiles, individual policies that the profiles you're gonna push gonna encompass the BIOS boot order.24:05Intersight management console access, KVM settings, storage card, etc. And now we'll transition to our next slide, please. Here we see the former UCS.24:22Managed mode on the left side there and compare it to the inner site managed mode.24:42On the right. So the UCS manager on the left there is gonna perform the configuration for the UCS fabric interconnects, all of your server blades that reside on those.24:47And for each of the domains that you have, for each of the pair of fabric interconnects, you'll need to configure manually all of the policies, profiles and the templates individually for each domain. So from a management perspective, you need to log into each UCS domain.25:04And reproduce or perform any actions that you need and want to get that consistent across each of your UCSM domains. Here we see a total of three based on the policy profile and template separation.25:22Now if we compare that to what inter site managed mode is able to bring on the far right, that's where you get a complete configuration of multiple UCS domains in a central location, and you'll manage those directly from within Intersight.25:41It's gonna standardize your policy and operations management for Cisco UCS from a single console, a single point of view, go into Intersight, configure your policy, your profiles and your templates.25:59And it's deployable across all of your infrastructure and remains consistent. Next slide please. And here we've got a good look at the hardware and software requirements.26:16For your inter site managed mode, you'll want to check these. Prior to that consider that a best practice before you make moves to implement that. I have got a link here. I'm gonna paste into.26:33Chat, if anyone wants to follow along, we'll be able to, there we go. And we'll see hardware wise.26:51For fabric interconnects that qualify will be the 6450 fours, your 6041 oh eight, basically your 6000 series and up to the the S 9108 hundred gig for both of those.27:11Your I/O modules, either 2000 series, 20 204-228-2304 up to the 2408. Your ifms, you'll have the 9108 models that qualify for that both the 25 gig.27:32Gig and the 100 gig for your actual servers, be able to use a B series C series and X series minimum model M fives, you'll be good up to M67 and eights.27:52Some of those maybe end of life though, please pay attention to any notifications you've had around those inter site will help you manage those end of life notifications as well and if we move on down to our victs, we see we have the 1314 and.28:1015000 series that are represented there. Licensing wise in the top right, you'll have a simplified version of licensing than in the past, you'll get either essentials or higher, which is advantage.28:30For your Cisco intersight. Each of these servers that you have there is gonna need a license if you want a way to qualify that or quantify that. As far as the scope goes, the entire UCS domain is gonna be configured in inter site managed mode.28:49And if we go back to the firmware in the bottom left, you want to make sure that you have the A bundle of four.13 or higher. That same version number also goes for your B and C series bundles.29:07Oh, the higher version four.23 plus is gonna provide the most comprehensive support and maybe a guidance if you had to open any any tack calls for that.29:24So please make sure it's knocked out ahead of time before you transition to Intersight management and scale wise in the bottom right we see it's the same as UCSM. So scale wise it'll go up to 20 individual chassis.29:40160 individual servers. At the bottom there, don't worry about reading that, that's just the link that I pasted into chat. You should have that available. And if we go into our next slide, we'll see that we are looking at enabling.29:57Intersight managed mode, then this is gonna be probably more interesting when we look at it in the demo that that my good friend Alan is gonna provide later, but we'll go through some of the steps here now so that we have a good mindset walking into that and we can clean all the information.30:15On the next slide for IMM configuration, we'll see if we want to deploy that to a greenfield. We'll have a prerequisite of simply having the firmware version of four.one.three or higher.30:33And we'll begin our steps of powering on the fis, set them up in inter site managed mode, and then claiming those fis inside your inter site environment. Next up we'll create a domain profile.30:48After that, we'll create a chassis profile for your servers, individual server profiles as needed in step five there, we can begin an install of any operating systems if we want to use that workflow.31:05On the next slide, we'll see that if we're not on the greenfield, but we are instead using Intersight to deploy in a brownfield environment, that is to say you have UCS manager today.31:23And you're going to override on top of that inter site managed mode. Notice that we've got an extra prerequisite there. Number one, of course, you wanna be on that, that specific firmware version 413. And 2nd one.31:39Prerequisite there is gonna be the fact that you're gonna need to erase the configuration on both your existing fis or use what's a newer change mode tool that you get when you upgrade to four.three.5C, which is a little higher firmware ver.31:55Version.32:15So if you're able to do that, your, your next step is gonna be to set up your, your fis in IMM mode specified during boot up, name those fis in Intersight, which is the same as the, the Greenfield deployment, you'll go through and create your domain profile.32:15Your chassis profiles and any server profiles that you need to set up and we'll end up with the same last step of step number five installing an operating system again using that workflow as needed. Now on our next slide we see we get a little more granular.32:36Our actual 1st step, as we referenced before.32:56Setting up your, your cyber interconnects in IMM mode. And when we say that specifically one of the steps that stands out you're gonna want to specify that. So when you boot up your fis, you're gonna be prompted to enter the management mode. It's highlighted on this slide.33:00Hopefully you can see that. And you'll see that we specified intersight. We're given choices to set a management mode at that point of UCSM or inter site and if we want to set up these fis in inter site managed mode, we're gonna type in the word inter site.33:19And hit enter and confirm that. So on the next slide that's going to show us and to erase that FI configuration.33:38You 1st definitely want to be upgraded to that firmware or one three performing erase configuration on both fabric interconnects. Of course prior to that, again, kind of backing in with the best practices, you want to make sure that you're directly connected to the fabric interconnects.33:55Via Cisco console cable, or you maybe using a terminal server that's set up properly, you want to test that beforehand, of course. Because once you raise that config, that that FI is gonna be standalone, not talking to the network, but accessible via the console.34:14Where you're gonna go through this setup process, setting IP address, DNS, NTP et cetera. On the next slide, we'll have exposure to the new change mode CLI command.34:31And that's an all in one command to let you change from UCS manager mode to inter site managed mode. And of course it's gonna go through the same steps that we just laid out. To get that functionality, you're gonna need to be@four.35C.34:47Let's pay attention there to the notes Both of the fabric interconnects are gonna be converted to intersite managed mode simultaneously.35:14Any network configuration that need to be con kept identical such as your IP address, net mask, gateway, et cetera, so that it can continue to talk on the network.35:23If you plan any changes, all they want to make sure those happen before you do just a straight up conversion. Now after those fis reboot, they're gonna be ready to be claimed in intersight. No initial setup is required at that particular point.35:39Now the UCS manager configurations that you had previously on that fabric interconnect is erased, not converted to Intersight with that particular command. We do have the inter site managed mode transition tool. If you need to convert those configurations and pass them from UCS manager mode.35:58Up to inter site managed mode prior to doing this work on the fis. Now what's gonna be included in that would be a lot of the server profiles settings.36:18Templates policies and pools that you have. You do want to read through their documentation, make sure make sure there's NO caveats to that, something that's important to you. Beneath that, we see this as an example.36:36Of what we're gonna see on the console when that process happens. Again, you may see this a lot more interesting fashion and Alan produces his demo there coming up in just a few slides. On our next one, we'll look at what happens after.36:53The initial setup, you see the device console that's available from the IP address of each of the fabric interconnects, be able to log in, you can see the the DNS NTP proxy settings.37:13Now those are gonna be automatically synced between fis that are appeared and adding those to intersight is gonna be standard practice if you've done that before. If not, you'll go and add a new target.37:31Copy the device ID and the claim code to separate values there from the individual device, plug those into your inter site instance.37:47And there'll be claiming process there for the SAS. If you're using an appliance, of course, if you want to add a new target to the appliance version of intersight, that maybe running on site, the appliance is gonna target.38:04And go out and grab your fis via credentials. So you had to put in admin username and password into your inter site appliance and point it at the device, the fabric interconnect in this case that you want to claim. Now the inventory.38:19Locator LEDs came in launch, things like that are gonna be empty at 1st, you may need to go in and define those.38:40There is a an API Explorer that's gonna take advantage of that red fish, protocol that's introduced with intersight managed mode, another reason to upgrade to that and a tech support bundle collection.38:57If you even need to is gonna be automatic or more automated for your devices that are claimed and connected in Cisco intersight. And I've got a Slido question coming up next.39:14I'm gonna want to know if you can tell us then it'll help us out.39:34If you have deployed any IMM domains in your environment, we're curious about your experience. On the next slide will have a QR code and a repeat of the, of the credentials to get logged into your Slido we're using today.39:38I encourage you to that. If you're not able to use Slido, maybe just drop it into the chat window so that we can see, just get a good feel, good gauge of how experienced our users are today.39:57And deploying any IMM domains. So I'll invite you to do that now here we've got question and in just a minute, we'll have the responses rolling in.40:14And we'll let our moderator Sandeep maybe share those responses so that we can see those that have answered the question. Keep a lookout in chat for those that aren't able to participate in Slido. Yeah.40:34Thank you Joe. Let me share my screen and just just 1 s. Okay, so it looks like most of the folks have already responded back.40:51And, around 64 % of the people have already deployed an IMM domain and and the rest have not done so far.41:09It's good to know. Thank you for sharing this. Hope this session makes it a bit easier for you to understand the IMM domains and how to configure those. And with that I'll I'll pass it back to you Joe. So let me.41:25Yeah Sandeep. 64 %. Wow, that is a good amount of experience among our attendees today.41:41So here we see just the presentation version, so we see two fabric interconnects. We see they are linked with the L1L2, and it's gonna be supported to have those in cluster mode, NO standalone fis.41:56Are available to be used in inter site managed mode. And when they're clustered with that L1L2 port, they're gonna be synchronized in the DC configuration, gonna include your proxy, your DNS, your TP.42:14Firmware images during any upgrades that you do, gonna be automatically synchronized and any Mac tables that you have are able to be used.42:29Across those fis. Primary subordinate role that's, that's only used now for managing the DC configuration behind the scenes only the primary can write to that database for the DC configuration. No impact to your server management.42:46Day today or the FI firmware upgrade order.43:06Places where you might normally see it. If it's not there, that means it's the the role that designation may not be important to the functionality that they're using, so it may not be shown in the UI in some places there. And both of those.43:16DCs, you're gonna have an active connection to Intersight using the IMC, and there's not gonna be any NXOS switch config that's synchronized between those fis.43:35And here we see a good representation of the IMM UCS domain profile and policies. We'll go through this and take a look and we see the UCS domain profile templates there that we're able to produce.43:55From those settings using using those templates is gonna help you standardize and accelerate your deployment of any domain profiles, server profiles for that.44:13As well chassis profiles, it's good practice to use the templates. This listing here shows us a good view of the UCS domain profile we see there in the middle.44:31And what that is consisted of, we've got FIA and FIB, other profiles might be hidden when it's not important. And we can see beneath that for those.44:46FI profiles, we've got things like your port policy VLAN policy, VSN policy, individual port settings, your system QoS policies, we've got the the ellipses there representing that there's even more.45:01And that we obviously can't fit them all on one screen, now for your your inter site managed mode UCS chassis profile policies, those can be.45:19Upstream into a template, again, best practices to take advantage of the templates to ensure speed and consistency across your environment. The actual chassis profile itself we see in the middle there can be applied directly to a chassis in this case chassis one.45:37And that profile can be made up of policies that we see below, and you can set things like the IMC access policy, the actual power status, SNMP settings, normal policy.45:54There's NO ellipses here and it's just a limited amount of settings there that you can apply to your chassis that maybe maybe all of those. And the UCS server profile policy here.46:11Well, there's a lot more available. Again, we see the top there you can produce a template, a UCS server profile template that you'll definitely want to do as far as best practices. That template can be used on either standalone or FI attached devices.46:26The actual UCS server profile itself, in this case we see to the left it's being deployed to blade one one over to the right is, applied to a standalone server that's sitting over in rack number one.46:46Again the policy's available to you include IMC, a scrub policy for those drives in the server that you need to. There's some caveats around the scrub policy, recommend you definitely investigate the help settings and intersight. Those are very good, it's very well documented.47:06We won't take a long time investigating that here today, but you also have your BIOS policies, a boot policy. SNMP, firmware.47:26Land of sand policy, all of those server profiles that I'm sure you're used to seeing there Now for change control surrounding your server profiles.47:41You'll be able to assign those server profiles and that's going to simply map the profile to a physical server, so you'll take your virtual profile and map it to the hardware of your physical server.47:59And it's gonna reserve that hardware resource inside of Intersight for your policies it's gonna implement as part of that profile. Now for the step number two there, where you actually deploy it, it's gonna push that configuration to your physical server.48:18Well as your endpoints, include your Vic, your CIMC, RAID controller, all of the individual hardware components that you have specified in your profile. Now it's also gonna download and state any firmware updates that you do.48:35And let you know when there's NO reboot performed, which is probably gonna be most of our time. If there is a reboot for required, it is gonna just show you there as far as part of an impact.48:51Of your policy. Now to activate that server, you are gonna need to reboot it to deploy any changes around firmware that you're maybe upgrading to. And it's only gonna show up when that disruption is required, as I said, it is gonna have an impact.49:07And show you that you might need to reboot.49:28It's gonna be triggered by rebooting to activate that server profile either from inter site or gracefully hopefully within the operating system of that individual server. Now for pending changes to that.49:30You can have either a status of not assigned, ok, not deployed or could be validating. And that's where you just want to give more time. If it's inconsistent, you'll want to delve into that and see or any pending changes.49:48It's gonna be difference between the inter site policy and what's last deployed to that server. Beneath that we see it's gonna move from from the various steps through validating, come back to inconsistent.50:06And on the right side, we see some screenshots that are gonna look more valuable in the demo that's coming up. Now the steps here also applies to the domain and the chassis profiles.50:23Here's the estimated impact window I alluded to before. On the right you can see there's a there's an orange section specified within that screenshot, and it says impact type. If you can't see that, and just gonna list there several of the impact types such as activation.50:41Requires a reboot.51:01Is gonna come with a management network change and storage reconfiguration. So it's a good warning there. Hey, when you apply this profile, you're gonna have to reboot and these things are gonna change for you to be helpful now that.51:03Impact section is gonna be there for your server profile deployments. Profiles are, are not gonna be disruptive, you know, domain profile deployments are gonna give you a warning when you have to reboot your fis.51:22Installing operating systems here, we see the three various ways there in the top right, you can use your KVM console, go directly to the server. Joe, I need to stop you right here. Can you double check the slide, please? Because it looks like there's some issue with the Webex and I'm not sure if you're looking at the right deck.51:40Can you check the slide? Yeah, let's see slide 28, is that right? No, we are on 22 slides right now.51:58Okay, so is this what you wanted? Slide 28? Right, I had been advancing the slides, they advanced for me. If you've got control, I'll let you place that where it should be.52:20Yeah, so which slide do you want to be on? So based on time, slide 31 on my end, the IMM best practices section. Okay. Yeah, let let me know once you, when you want me to change the deck and I'll I'll change this slide, ok?52:37Okay, I'll go ahead and advance it to IMM best practices, please. It is NO, ok? And so next slide.52:56We should see the IMM configuration best practices and listed out here, I don't need to read all of these, but we see that there's a Cisco provided BIOS configuration is recommended that to use that. The next one's, you know, again, Cisco provided adapter configuration.53:11It's recommended that you use that as well.53:32So for your shared policies versus your individual policies, you want to use the shared policies whenever possible, especially around the domain profile to include your port, your VLAN, your vsan policy.53:34Intersight managed mode lets you share those policies across your domains. And if you can clone your policies to create identical but separate policies and profiles, you wanna ensure that your vnet QoS settings.53:53Match the fabric QoS value and you want to definitely read again before you do any changes to go up to IMM. You want to read the inter site storage?54:10Best practices. I'm gonna paste that in chat here for everyone should be a nice document for you to take advantage of. And at this point Sandeep, I'm gonna hand it back over to Alan in.54:25He's gonna bring us a nice demonstration of what I just presented.54:45Over to you Alan. All right. Thank you, Joe. I'll give you 1 s here, make sure everyone can see my screen. Yes, yes, I see it. Awesome. So.54:50We're gonna walk through just setting up a quick IMM domain here today, so that means we're gonna spend most of our time over here in the configuration section, and I'm actually gonna build this off of a template so it is reusable for us. So we'll start with our UCS domain templates so you can actually see a.55:05Playing around creating one earlier for this. So we're gonna set it in our expert insight series organization maybe call it our expert insight series.55:22Domain demo and i'll move my mouse so you can see what I'm typing.55:42And this the 1st thing we do is really set up our VLAN and vsan configuration policies. Now, for the sake of speed, I've got half of these set up right now, so we're gonna pre select our A side policies for our vsan.55:50That should say VLAN or gonna manually configure our B side ones. The reason we do a different policy on each side is in case you need to make the one sided change or you need to test something, it allows you to change it on just that one side without changing on the other one.56:09So we're just gonna go here VLAN on our B side. We're gonna add in some VLANs real quick. We'll give it a prefix, and then VLAN one's always gonna be included by default and for us we need two and then now we're gonna go 100 through 200 to the ones.56:25We use here in our lab, and then we're gonna need to define a multicast policy. You can select an existing policy and if you have existing policies, you can always view those settings by clicking little I here.56:45Nope, but for the, for this example, we're actually gonna create a new policy, so our 06:23 multicast policy.56:59And this just sets the snooping state to query your state and the IP proxy state, so we're gonna leave it on the default values for our configuration here, create that policy, you'll see that it has been enabled. The other thing we're gonna do because we are only using a single set of uplinks, we're not doing anything with this, we're gonna leave our auto allow on uplink.57:16Links checked, and that just means all of our VLANs are gonna be carried on all of our uplinks. So I'm gonna go ahead and click add here and it shows us our VLANs. You can have it displayed the range or as the individual VLANs, and you can add another set of ranges with a different prefix. E.g., if you're setting up.57:36Guest VLANs versus management VLANs, so now you just want to change those prefixes. We're gonna set VLAN two as our native VLAN here, and then we're gonna go ahead and create that policy.57:55And then for those of you who do fiber channel, we're gonna do the same thing here for our VSAN policy. So B.58:10We're gonna add our creative Vsan B name for our uplink, and this is gonna be Vsan two oh two and our is gonna be 22 2202.58:31If you are doing multiple vsans and you need to enable uplink trunking, we'll just set this flag. We're only using the one vsan so we don't really need to bother with trucking today. We're gonna click create and now we have our policies here and now that it's checked, so it's validated, we're good to go. We'll go to our next step.58:52And this is our port configuration. So the port configuration really kind of defines how you've got your ports laid out. You can see we've got a pre built one here for our A side already. Now we're gonna go ahead and similarly create one for our B side. So this is the IS, IMM.59:0850 652B, and we're gonna select a model of fabric interconnect because each model is gonna have slightly different configurations for breakout ports, for unified ports and so forth. We're looking at the new 6600, we're gonna create one set of fiber channel ports for those who do set.59:30He's saying, so in this case that will be port 17 through 20.59:49Then we need to configure our breakout ports and over here on port 52, we're gonna break this out, so we'll select it and go to configure and set this as a four by 100 breakout, then we're gonna go ahead and click next.59:54And this is where we define our port roles, and you've got a variety of report roles in UCS, so we're gonna start with setting up our ports that are gonna go down to our X series chassis, so ports one through four, and we're gonna configure these as server ports. Here we have the option of setting which forward error correction. Just leave this on auto unless you.01:00:09Or specifically.01:00:29You know in the connecting to this is the the 931A YCFX for uplink port, then you're gonna want to change this to the C 1704. Manual chassis numbering. So you can set this as automatic or manual. I prefer manual chassis.01:00:31The numbering if I'm doing rack servers. And the reason for that is we're gonna number the servers kind of based on the order they come up when they're connected to the fabric interconnect and sometimes for whatever reason a server kind of a lower in the rack will boot up faster, and it causes some odd numbering, so we're just gonna say hey.01:00:51For port one, it's gonna be device one for port two, device two, three and four so forth. So in this case we're actually gonna do chassis on ports three and four and really does both as device three as a port channel. So we're gonna save that.01:01:10Next, we're gonna create the port channel for our uplinks. So we'll create a port channel, we have channel ID, channel one, speed auto, forward air correction auto. We have the ability to set some policies here so the Ethernet group policy, link aggregation, link control.01:01:29If we take a quick look at these, the ethernet net network group policy is just, you know, what VLANs are allowed. This, e.g., this policy is for VLAN two only. In this case since we're kind of doing all VLANs, we're just gonna let this be. We're gonna create a policy.01:01:47Actually we don't need a policy since we're not doing disjoint layer two, today, but this is where you would set those up. For flow control, we'll go ahead and create a quick flow control policy.01:02:05Yeah it's just are we priority on or off for flow control? So this is if you're doing PFC so you've got those those lossless cost classes set up in your QoS.01:02:23So we'll create this and we'll assign it link control policy This is just our UDLD admin state, so we're gonna be UDLD enabled and we're gonna set it to normal.01:02:39And then for our link ag policy, we're just gonna leave it as suspend individual as to false and the LAC period is normal. So changing these settings is gonna depend more on what your upstream network is really expecting. If you don't setting these it's.01:03:01Just gonna leave everything in those default values.01:03:21We can label our port channel, so this is gonna be our VPC A side, and we're gonna scroll down to grab our ports and it's gonna be ports 5021 and two, be the A side of our uplink. Conversely, you know, three and four will be our B side.01:03:25And a different port channel, but we're all gonna configure this A side port channel today. If you need to create a fiber channel port channel, you're gonna come in here and change this from a side up link to FC uplink then we're gonna get our channel, we're gonna get our which I believe was two oh two today. I'm gonna set our port speed.01:03:44The 32 gig, but we're gonna select our ports and in the case of saying everything on the A side is gonna go up to our A port. So this is gonna be our B side.01:04:03Not today we'll save that and we'll save that configuration. And so now we have those ports configured and saved, so we can see our B side ports over here now configured as well. You get a brief summary, so we have four FC ports.01:04:19We have one FC uplink, we have one ethernet uplink, but our port channels, we got four FC uplinks and two ethernet uplinks. In total we've got and we've got four server ports and we've got our 45 unconfigured ports for future expansion. The next thing we have with our UCS domain settings. Most of these are optional.01:04:34E.g., NTP syslog, netcon. NTP I always encourage everyone to to set.01:04:54Just because having secretous time across all your devices makes any sort of future troubleshooting a lot simpler, so I'll enable that one.01:05:03We will come down here and grab our US East time zone. We'll create RNTP policy.01:05:23We're kind of gonna skip the rest of these policies for the moment, but they're pretty simple syslog policy, you're gonna give a syslog server. We'll, we'll do the net configure network configuration policy. And we're gonna go ahead and just instead of using using DHCP, we'll.01:05:37We'll give it a preferred.01:05:57DNS server, our secondary DNS server, and if you're using IPV six, you'll click here to enable IPV six even to your IPv six DNS as well.01:05:59The one required policy we have in here though, however, system QoS. So you see we have a pre configured QoS policy here that we could go and see what it's doing. We can see, you know, it's gotten one assignment to one template, but we're gonna create a new policy today, so this is our.01:06:22And here we have our settings. So by default that are always enabled, you have best effort, which is cost any and then you have your FCOE, which is gonna be cost any as well actually cost you know.01:06:47And then we have set mtu, so this defaults to 1500, this defaults to 2240. But let's say we want to enable a higher bandwidth class here on cost five for jumbo frames, and then we also want to set up another just 1500 MTU on cost four, so we can kind of separate our traffic.01:07:00We'll get to configuring our vnix.01:07:19So we'll enable that. One of the things I recommend to everybody though is if you create a cost and enable a class and set the MTU higher than 1500, you need to come down there to this best effort class and make sure that it's also set to that higher value. The reason we do that is while we can control what's going on in the UCS, we can't necessarily.01:07:21Control what happens on the upstream switches and in the event that the cost cost markings get remarked or remapped upstream, we want to make sure we don't drop on ingress due to an MTU mismatch just because the upstream switch doesn't necessarily follow the same MTU markings that we have and are expecting.01:07:42So we'll create that and it'll give it a second to validate our next button will highlight and we can click next. And now we just get a summary of our configuration. So we get a summary of the port configurations, a summary of our VLAN configurations, and a summary of the configured values we have for our domain. If we had any.01:08:02Errors or warnings that would show up here. We don't, so we're good to go. And at this point we can derive the profiles.01:08:22So we're gonna assign this later because right now both of our ucs's are actually already assigned and in production. So we're gonna drive two profiles. So we're setting up for our next two domains.01:08:29We're gonna click next and it's gonna give us a summary, so how do we wanna name these? So these are actually gonna be for our new domains, so this is gonna be I know these are going on row B these are gonna be in rack 22 and we're gonna count up by one.01:08:47So B 22 Imm's one and two. And we're gonna leave them still an RIS organization here. We're gonna start count from one counting up here.01:09:03And we're gonna click next. And what we should have happened now is that we are ready to go. We have our summary here, they're ready, we click derive. I have my template here and.01:09:18Now if I go over to profiles.01:09:38Into domain profiles, I should see that those two profiles have now shown up. So we have our new profiles here. They're ready to go ready to be assigned to our domains once we get our new fabric interconnects in. So we can assign them now to a discovery fabric interconnect. We can edit them. We can detach them from the template if you.01:09:42We want to start splitting these off and doing slightly different configs on each one, but that template gives us a common starting point. Next thing we're gonna do is we're gonna go back over here in our templates and we're gonna create chassis templates. You can see here we have one created already for a chassis that has those 440P PCIe expansion modules in it.01:10:02I'm gonna go into our organization and we're gonna create a new one, which is just for our X series with NO GPU.01:10:21And then here we've got four settings. IMC access, this is gonna be the policies where we create and configure the IMC access, where the chassis.01:10:38To provide in band or out of band configuration and the IP pool that we're gonna use to, to actually access those slots for your KVM. So we're gonna use in band configuration we're gonna put on VLAN two oh sorry it's actually four to 43 here, so we're gonna use VLAN four for that.01:10:54And we're incurring IP pool for our imcips.01:11:13This is gonna be.01:11:30Two and then we will create our IP blocks. So, you know, this is gonna be for a single chassis.01:11:48Actually this is a pool for templates and we're gonna have it for multiple chassis, so we're gonna start without sorry, and I'm gonna go ahead and make this a pool of 16 so that gives us enough coverage for two full chassis.01:12:06We could do an ID mapping policy here, and this is gonna allow us to map some parts of this block to a specific resource group within our organization. We're not gonna do that today, but.01:12:25We we do have some literature on that that we can share with the team afterwards next and then we're gonna not, we're gonna disable the IPv six because we don't run IPV six today in our lab, but it's a similar setup. We have six successfully created the pool.01:12:41But now we're done and we're back here and that should assign. The other things we're gonna do is we're gonna set our power policies, and so this is gonna be for our.01:13:00UCS chassis. We're gonna use a grid redundant policy. Actually, we're gonna, No we're doing n plus one today. And then you have the options of the power save mode, dynamic rebalance and power capacity. I would encourage you when you come in here and set this up to just mouse over these eyes and read this for a little bit. Power save mode just.01:13:17If the total power budget of the chassis is less than the what you have allocated for PSUs, we'll, we'll spend down a a power supply just to save you a little bit of power in that case. Dynamic rebalancing will allow us to kind of rebalance the load between servers depending on power usage.01:13:36And then the extended power capacity will actually let me use that plus one for additional power, if the servers are trying to draw that, even though it's plus one, it just means it'll throttle down the power if you lose a power supply. And you can also hard cap your power allocation if you need to for or you plan to for any sort of capacity.01:13:53Planning or, you know.01:14:13They're cooling planning where you're really trying to control that at a granular level granular level, we'll create our policy here as in plus one and then the SNMP policy for SNMP forwarding. And then finally thermal is gonna create your, your fan policies really. And so what we're doing here is.01:14:16Termining other fan control balanced policy is gonna be your default, so that's what you're gonna get if you don't set this. Acoustics gonna be the the least loud we can make it while cooling it within the acceptable amount. Max cooling, just tries to make this cool as possible. We're gonna set ours to a balanced just because that's what works in our lab.01:14:36And there we go and we're gonna click next, and then everything is ready, we're gonna be able to derive two policies again. So we're gonna go to assign later. We're just gonna derive one policy this time.01:14:56We're just gonna name it the x series NO GP one and leave it at that. And now we should in our profiles see that that chassis policy is showing up.01:15:12So there's our new chassis policy and you can see our existing policies that have kind of been made off that other template already. And then the last part of course is our server profile template. This is gonna be the ones that probably get the most used. You can see here we already have five defined templates in here. We're gonna create a new one today.01:15:29Oh Select the organization you want to create the template in and the type of template. So UCS standalone, these are those ISM that Joe was talking about earlier. It's gonna be strictly in your rack servers, so the, the CE.01:15:49222 252-424-0544 hundreds or or aC8 405A if you've got the the GPU server. We're gonna look at the UCS server attached today though, so we're gonna do a.01:16:03X2 or X2 10CM8 policies and so that's gonna be our our template for for our 210CM eights. So we have a lot of policies in here and you can actually skip almost all of the policies in here.01:16:24We'll use default values.01:16:44But we're gonna go through several of these today. So 1st up was we need a UUID pool create this and if you hover over here, it'll tell you the format that needs to be in, so we're gonna.01:16:46Be super creative here and I'll just put a C there so I know it's mine. And then the starting prefix and ending prefix. And again, I'm just gonna need less than creative here.01:17:11I'll this out and then I need enough for let's say two chassis, so we'll do 16.01:17:31The sizing of the pool kind of varies depending on what your plans are. I have customers that kind of make their pool small and their 1632 have some customers that just do 256 for a pool size and assume that if they go out of that, then they'll make a new pool. So it's kind of up to you there. You can also create multiple blocks within the same prefix if you want.01:17:40Do that to kind of.01:17:59Spread this out. It's really kind of a user discretion here. So we're gonna create that. And then for BIOS policy, we're gonna create a BIOS policy.01:18:01And you have some options here, so you can use generic BIOS policies, you can use model specific policies. Our recommendation is that you actually use the Cisco predefined configuration. So we'll toggle this.01:18:20I'm gonna use an M eight Intel servers in this case, and my workload type, do you have analytics, CPU intensive, high energy, high performance computing, low latency, virtualization RD BMS, so we're gonna say for a virtualization load, which is.01:18:31Most of what we use here in the lab, and we're gonna click next. And what this is gonna do is for all of the different configurations options within the BIOS policy, it's gonna put them the recommended match, based on cisco's recommendations for each one of those settings.01:18:50For this combination of oop, give me a second. There we go. Sometimes that does take a little bit of load, and the reason we recommend using those is because if you start to open these up, see, ok, advanced not that many options, boot options.01:19:08These are all the different boot options to set BIOS. And you can see if we scroll down here there's literally a hundreds of options over a hundred options in here to set all all of this. The recommended options are the way to go. The one exception of that would be if you were following a specific CBD or white paper that we have published.01:19:27For a very specific use case where we worked with our teams have worked with the OS vendors, the application vendors who really tweak these settings for maximum performance, then you may want to follow those otherwise just the recommended settings are the way to go. That's what we'll create our BIOS policy here.01:19:45We're gonna load in, we're gonna create our boot order. It helps to tell server how to boot. If you don't create one of these, it'll just kind of go with whatever it detects So we're gonna leave it on, we're gonna enable secure boot.01:20:06We're gonna add a boot device.01:20:24And we are just going to boot from local disk. If you mouse over here, it'll say, it'll tell you what you can and cannot use, so there are some reserved names here, so I'm gonna boot.01:20:26If we go over here to slot, it will tell us which slots are available. So we are actually gonna set this up for the.01:20:47The M store raid, and then you have the optional settings here for your bootloader name, your bootloader path, and a bootloader description, again, you can specify which image you're using here. We're just gonna boot target into here.01:20:52Create. We can select a firmware policy, and this is gonna determine which version of firmware we're running so we do need to select our server model here again. So we are gonna scroll down to our.01:21:11M eight. And right here, there will be for the suggested release based on that version, the little blue thumbs up. We're gonna click that and use the suggested release, memory settings PCIe connectivity.01:21:30These settings are kind of all here in optional. The power settings, the one I would probably check just to make sure, and so we're gonna actually do a power setting for our inmate power.01:21:44And it's just our power profile. So power restore is the one I would like to look at here. If you lose power of your facility, it's once the power is restored, how would you like this to behave? You can have it always be off so you manually power that back up once power restoration is complete and you're satisfied, you can have it always on, which means as soon as you.01:22:04Can boot, it'll move back up or you can do last state, which means if you turned it off.01:22:24Because your new power maintenance is happening, it will stay turned off until you you go. All right, and then we'll go and create that policy. So we're gonna move on. We have several other optional policies here. We have the IMC access again, so instead of setting on the chassis, we can set it on a per blade basis.01:22:29Certificate management serial in IPMI policies. With, with most of these, what I would say is if you have an IPMI policy or if you have a specific use case with serial number one, you can figure those, they're not really required.01:22:48And most people do in fact skip those. It just kind of depends. Normally they're, we see them used when we're doing automation and you're using that out of band connectivity. So I'm gonna go ahead and click next and we're gonna do our storage config, and we're just gonna select a quick storage policy here.01:23:04And were to use the M.two rate configuration in.two raid store is the slot, so make sure that that rate is configured. If you're using front panel front facing disk, you can set them as Jbod or we can, if not configured good.01:23:25Or you can set it as rate zero, really kind of dependent upon the controllers, the stuff you got in there, you can do a rate controller configuration here and then build your drive groups. We don't have any servers to build the drive groups with, so it's kind of hard to or.01:23:41Show that at the moment. We'll go ahead and create that though so we have our boot drives ready to go. And then we have, our network configuration. So we have a LAN connectivity. We've actually prebuilt this policy in here today. So let everybody take a quick look at it.01:23:56What this is gonna be is we create and set up our our next for here we created our management A and this is built off of template that we will go take a quick look at. It uses our management Mac pool and then we have.01:24:14Our ethernet settings that we'll look at when we go look at that template. So for now though we are just gonna select our LAN connectivity policy, we're gonna click next, and then we're gonna derive our profile similar to everything else, so we're just gonna.01:24:30Assigned later will derive one quick profile. We'll leave it as a default name and derive, and we should see that profile deriving here. So last thing I'm gonna do, and I know we're running a little short on time, is our policy.01:24:45But I'm just gonna open up this one here that we have already built actions and edit. So you can see what's in here we have created our Mac bull that we're using for our Vnic.01:25:03We have decided which switch it's going on is either switch A or B for failover you can enable enable failover, this will allow it to failover to the other fabric interconnect if it's the one it's been to goes down. And then we have our policies here for Ethernet control QoS and adapter.01:25:19So for Ethernet control, this determines whether we're running CDP or LLDP, the Mac forward security settings, and then the important thing here is the action on uplink failure. Link down as the default state, this means that if we lose the uplink that this is pinned to, we'll actually down the vnics and the operator.01:25:39The system knows that that path is NO longer valid.01:25:59Alright, and we should canceled this. We have our QoS policy. So with QoS, what you're gonna see here is just the MTU settings for this Vnic and which priority class we've set it in. The important you know that this MTU matches the.01:26:03Either the priority class you're putting it in?01:26:23Okay, save that and then adapter policy, here these set the various configurations similar to doing the BIOS policies when you create an adapter policy, you can actually tell it to use a Cisco predefined policy.01:26:26So that is kind of how our templates are set up. One of the interesting things here is you can actually set one of these up and just edit. You can edit it and once that edit changes it will update across all those different vnics that are derived off that policy, so if you're doing things like.01:26:46Changing the VLAN, it's actually really kind of easy to mass changing VLANs there.01:27:04So with that said, and I know we're short on time. I'm gonna hand this back to I think Sandeep to close this out. Thank you Ellen and.01:27:09I'll pass it on to Joe. Joe over to you. Great, thanks everyone. Real quick in the presentation here. So we've got key points to remember. If you can keep in mind that IMM is gonna facilitate the monetization of your compute domain as we've seen through policies.01:27:24And profiles. And point number two, your policy driven approach gonna be to configure UCS domains and your FI attached servers. And point number three, the configuration and operations are gonna be driven from within the inter site UI.01:27:44That's where you're gonna perform your firmware upgrades, edit your clones, unassign any UCS domains as needed, and configure your server profiles. This point back over to you Mohammy? For Sandeep, sorry. Thank you Joe. So.01:28:03It's time for Q and A and so we we already got some questions in the chat. I'll probably address one of those questions which was around the PowerShell SDK.01:28:22It was mentioned that like I mean, where can we get help with regards to the PowerShell SDK? So, with, with PowerShell SDK, if you're running into any issues, what you want is you need to go to the GitHub repo and under that you can open a new issue and explaining all the details about like what.01:28:39Problems you are running into and the developers who are working on the PowerShell SDK, they will look into that problem and they will respond back.01:28:58With the corrective measures on how to address that problem or if something needs to be fixed in the partial SDK, they will fix it on their side and post a newer version of the of the SDK. And beyond this, I don't see any questions, any other questions so we'll just move on.01:29:06Oh. And for more additional resources, you can also go to community.cisco.com. That's where you can probably get answers to your questions. You can interact with other people for a deeper engagement.01:29:25I'll I'll post the link on the chat right now, and I'm going to launch the session server today, so give me one quick second. Let me start the survey for feedback.01:29:41We would definitely want to hear back from you guys around, today's session. If you have any ideas for future sessions or if you have any recommendations, please do share your thoughts. I'll keep it running while we review the new slides.01:29:57And once we close the session, I'll close it out at that point in time.01:30:16So, oops move on. Now this lists the upcoming sessions in the expert insight series. You can scan the QR code to register for the upcoming sessions and I've also posted the link in the chat.01:30:21The next session it will be on the IMM transition tool from UCSM to inter site migration, which is on 30th of June and subsequently we do have some sessions on what's new with inter site in the last couple of months, the Splunk integration with intercite, and eventually at the end we'll be doing a quick recap on.01:30:39For all the sessions with a live Q and A.01:30:58Oh, we would also like to cover one more topic before we end today's session. We would like to take a minute to talk about the Cisco IQ. If you have attended Cisco Live or if you have been looking at the news that came from Cisco Live, you will see that Cisco IQ is one of the major announcements.01:31:02Now the question is, what is Cisco IQ, what kind of value it offers and how can you get started with it?01:31:21So Cisco IQ is a digital intelligence platform that leverages anonymized global data to provide you with the personalized insights and benchmarks which are tailored to your specific IT environments. It allows you to measure your current technology maturity against industry standards, helping you identify.01:31:28Exactly where to focus your optimization efforts on. Now by transforming complex data into clear actionable recommendations, it empowers your teams to make data driven decisions that accelerate your digital transformation goals. Now to sum it up.01:31:48We have highlighted four points in here. The 1st one is the complete landscape clarity. So it kind of gives you a single clear view of your entire IT environment instead of like managing blind spots, you gain the visibility needed to understand your full infrastructure at a glance, be it your data center products, be it your networking.01:32:05Products be it any other Cisco product which you have, so everything will be available or viewable under, under one platform. Proactive resilience.01:32:25The Cisco IQ identifies vulnerabilities and misconfigurations before they cause issues, so which keeps your business resilient and operational. Rapid resolution is another one when incident occurs every minute counts, so we kind of collapse the resolution timelines by automating documentations streamlining it.01:32:34Escalations helping you move from hours to, to minutes to troubleshoot your problems.01:32:54And lastly, we have the contextualized professional services, get it right the 1st time. So Cisco IQ kind of applies over 40 years of institutional expertise to your specific projects ensuring your deployments follow best practices from day one.01:33:01Now for existing CX cloud customers, you'll be able to migrate your data automatically to Cisco IQ. All you need is log into the Cisco IQ platform by going to iQ.cisco.com and in there you can just say name your account, select what to migrate, and it will kind of give you options.01:33:22To migrate your data from the CX cloud platform.01:33:42And then you, you can create account, migrate the data, and then your CX cloud data will be migrated automatically to the Cisco IQ platform. And once you're done, all you need is just go to the Cisco IQ platform and start using it.01:33:45The next option is for customers who are.01:34:06New and they don't have a CX cloud account. So if you are totally new, all you need is go to Cisco IQ iQ.cisco.com, create a new Cisco IQ account using your Cisco CCO credentials. Once you are logged in, you can create a Cisco IQ account using your company name, select the primary storage.01:34:10Which region, and you just need to get that account created.01:34:30Once you're done, you'll be redirected to the Cisco IQ launchpad. And once you log in, it will show you all the options like this connected Cisco Cloud products, add service contracts, add Cisco IQ links, manage users, and again, you can explore the Cisco IQ interface.01:34:35Once you log in. Lastly before you go, if you need any help to onboard, please leave your your email to us in the service section and we will reach out to you with this. And I'm going to paste this link where you can find more.01:34:53FAQs around Cisco IQ. I'm going to post the link now in the chat. That concludes our session for today. Thank you all for your time, your active engagement, and your valuable feedback. We we hope this overview of inter site.01:35:12Provides you with the clarity and confidence needed to streamline your infrastructure operations and if you have any follow up questions as you begin your configurations, please don't hesitate to reach out to us. Have a great rest of your day. Thank you so much.01:35:32