Deep-Dive on Cisco Intersight - Part 1

Oh yeah so this is the today, today's agenda. So let's get started.00:00Okay, so in what we are going to see as a overall in this session, so we'll start with different different features that is available. So how these features will.00:17Actually help you like in in case of if you have if you found any issues like how do you validate using the inter site, so we we want to make sure there are there are NO potential issues in your infrastructure.00:33Or is everything is covered under support, right? So in in terms of contract, so how do you, you know, in a single centralized management, how do you see your complete device coverage in terms of.00:50The hardware coverage, support coverage and if you want to know how is there any advisories, so is there any security advisories or field notices or the end of life advisories? So what is the option we have?01:07And in end of life end of end of sales notifications and how do you faster deploy the profiles and templates, and is there any compliant part like you can.01:23Have a complete visibility on the software versions that you are running on your infrastructure and especially we have power and pooling and connectivity metrics that is being introduced in newly introduced in inter site, ok?01:38So this is the overall picture that we are going to see in this session along with the IMM and the IMM transition tool and the Nutanix integration, right? So let's go with one by one like one by one on what is covered here.01:55Right ok so what is not covered, we are not going to deep dive on the deployment and configuration, so we have a separate session for that which is the 3rd session. So where we will be showing you the complete creation of the policies, profiles and templates and pushing those policies to the UCS servers.02:13And bring that UCS servers by installing the way so that is what the next session is about, ok? So before I start with the features, so let us quickly go through what is inter site, so anyways, the 1st session has covered what is inter site very deeply.02:33So now before we start, we just go through quickly what it's intersite. So inter site is a centralized managed centralized single plane of glass for your infrastructure operations, right? So it is, it, it is.02:51So it kind of gives you a simplified experience of managing monitoring and configuring your infrastructure in terms of compute, right? So it is a compute focused.03:07Centralized management single plane of glass, ok? So where you can connect to your infrastructure or you can have a visibility about your infrastructure especially the whatever the visibility like there are different dashboards and the widgets you can use it for the visibility.03:24And you can secure your infrastructure by the, you know, from the advisories or security vulnerabilities, right? And you can deploy and automate the configuration through insight. So this is for overall quick introduction about the insight.03:43Right. Okay, so before I go further Eric, yeah, can you start the polling? Okay.04:02The 1st was It started. Now everybody you're welcome to, to vote for your actual usage with Intersight. How often do you log into Intersight on what basis?04:18Okay, so I really recommend you to go through this you know start using this polling because it will give you us a very good insight on how this platform is used by the customer so that we can improve our experiences in upcoming versions, upcoming releases.04:37Right. Okay, so meanwhile you're doing the.04:55So I hope you are doing the Slido part. So let's wait for a couple a minute for you to answer the slido. I hope you got this slido.04:59From your side see 32 % of the people here.05:19Rarely log into Intersight. Oh ok yeah yeah yeah That's 25 % 23 % logged in every day. Okay. That's good, that's good, good. Yeah.05:35All right. Okay, then, ok, so what are the supported solutions or what are the different integrations you can do and what are the supported solution when you want to use the inter site with the compute focused infrastructure? So you can see that.05:53UCS is already there on the and the MDS, so which is by default is available and we have in terms of hyper convergence we earlier had Cisco hyperflex now we have.06:13And Nutanix so also once the hyperflex is we have partnered with Nutanix for the solution the Nutanix software will be running on the Cisco, so where you can also claim Nutanix cluster on the inter site and you can have the visibility of.06:26For your Nutanix clusters as well. Apart from that of in terms of server wise virtualization, we have VMware vCenter and the Nutanix Center. And in terms of the integration, the ITSM and the SIM tools, we have ServiceNow, we have Splunk integration.06:46And for 3rd party storage we have Hitachi, NetApp and few storage, and a few 3rd party servers can also be client like your Dell servers and the HD servers. So these are the overall supported solutions and the integration options we have.07:05With with Nutanix, right? Okay, so now we'll answer one by one questions so by going through the features of the inter site.07:25Okay, so do you want to see if you want to see is there any potential issues with your server in terms of hardware failures or any other any other issues related to the hardware? So we have a separate wizard.07:40Of the dashboard that it will be automatically notifying you on the dashboard, right? Whether how many servers are healthy, how many servers are in critical stage, not only the servers but it will also give you the insights on the fabric interconnect.07:56And the device coverage status or how many servers are in support coverage and how many days it will get expired, so when it will get expired so all these things you can see and if your servers and if your system is up to date and compliant.08:14So we have a visibility over your versions the version, server version that that is former bundle and the FI server FI former version and the storage former version, so all these different.08:32Categories are available. You can easily identify which are compliant and which are we also have something called HCL, so we'll be covering on that part, ok? Okay, so we have different dashboards here. You can see this is the, you know.08:51Different options that is available for different purposes, ok? So e.g., the dashboards are the one which will give you the overall view of the inter site where you can customize the results based on your requirement, right? Next comes the operate tabs under.09:09We have servers so which will give you the visibility over the blade server, rack server and 3rd party server.09:30And chassis, so if you are running a chassis or the UCS based IMM based chassis will also be available under the chassis option. And we have fabric connect so again the base and the UCSM based.09:37And we have Nutanix cluster options so which this is where you will have the Nutanix cluster listed down here and you can do multiple operations over this Nutanix cluster from the inter site itself. And when it comes to networking, we have our next.09:54And of course we have hyperflex clusters where now this is end of life end of sale but we still provide the support until February 2029. So that's what that's why we have the cluster tab here.10:15And we we also have the visibility for that party storage earlier we had discussed this one under virtualization. So I'll quickly show you these tabs in our inter site portal. So this is the inter site portal where you can land it here. This is the dashboard, right?10:32So you can see under the dashboard we have operate tabs, so under the operate tab we have servers so right servers will give you the list of servers, which is the UCS C series V series and rack servers.10:52So you can go through, so there are different you know these are already available so these are all automatically populated related, you know, from the information, from the telemetry information that's been collected from the servers.11:08So these informations and the dashboards are already populated, so you can go through it. So similarly we have option for chassis. So it will give you the chassis server, right?11:25And the fabric interconnect information in the fabric interconnect tab and Nutanix cluster information in the Nutanix cluster tab, right? So you can click on this cluster and you can see, you know, the basic information and the virtual machines or what are running on this.11:42What are all running on this Nutanis cluster and the node details so even if we can we also have the GPUs so if you're running some GPUs on your cluster, that will be also listed down here.12:01Right, and then the hyperflex cluster and then the virtualization. So again, the virtualization will have different options, so you can easily see what are the Vmiss that is running on this VMware.12:17V center. So you can see the data center details and the cluster details, the host details, right? So you can also see the data store details which are created in this center and this integrated system will give you the integrator, so if anything is integrated.12:34So you can use this app, right?12:55Okay, so now, ok, so this is the dashboard tab so which will give you the overall information. So overview of your infrastructure. So again this is a customized one. You can create your own customize and add your own wizards in this dashboard.12:58Right, so it gives you the health status and the the other information like what are the inventory details and the you know the cluster details and the former details, right?13:17So you can see this again you can create this this another dashboard for the another dashboard for the contract details or the under the licensing details or you can also.13:37Use the same dashboard, the dashboard and add the add that as a result, right? So you can see it here where I have this server health information where my you know 27 servers are in healthy status, 16 are in the critical status, 14 are in the.13:52In the warning status. So here you can see the HCL status, so this is very very interesting feature.14:12So that I will be covering in the later part. Then we can see the server inventory, right? So where see how many are unassociated, so how many servers are unassociated with the profiles, how many are standalone, how many are managed by the inter site?14:20And in the server bundle, you can see this different versions that is available. So you can click on this one, it will go through those servers, right? Right. Okay so you can see UCS profile summary, how many profiles we have, what are their status?14:38How many are ok, how many not not assigned, not deployed, inconsistent?14:58And server models, so what are the server models we have? We have UCSM six servers B 206 and UCSX, hyperflex, right? So here you can see this is this is what I was talking about the licensing and the contract status, so how many license.15:02This you have.15:22So we I have advantage 56 advantage licenses which are in in compli in compliance, under the essential I have one server under in terms of hardware soft hardware support coverage. So since it's it is in the lab environment, I am I I don't have any coverage.15:24As for the hardware.15:44But if you in your environment it will be showing you how many not covered, how many is going to expiring soon, so which is very important because if you know what is expiring soon, you can easily plan for the hardware refresh, right? So then how many are in the active?15:45So this is the overall picture on the, you know, the dashboard side, right? Okay so next comes the storage part. So storage part you can see we have separate so here in our environment I have created some.16:04Great dashboard for the hyperflex cluster and separate dashboard for the Nutanix cluster.16:24So you can see in the overall, so it will not be used e.g. you are working in a knock environment, right? So where you in in every shift starts you want to go through the dashboard and see everything is ok in terms of operations perspective, right? So that.16:30It will be useful in these dashboards are very very useful for your day to day monitoring purposes, right?16:50So you can see this this Nutanix cluster. So here you can see the overall health of the Nutanix cluster, so here I have three, all the three are in the critical so I'm going to just see why those are in the critical status. So you can see here I can see these alarms also because of these alarms I.16:57I'm getting these all the three.17:17Notes are in a critical status, right? So you can see the power supply one is down and the power supply one is down on so this is down on the power supply one is down on this cluster, right? Similarly on this one, what is this so there is some CVM issue which is related to the password, right? Again, the power.17:20The Power supply is down also in this cluster.17:39So you can go through this, right? You can go through and easily, you can identify what is the issue and you can start working on, on the resolution of those issues, ok? All right, so similarly, you can also have the so same.17:43Okay, one more thing I would like to highlight is the storage utilization, right?18:03So you can easily identify what is your storage utilization in your cluster, right? And the version, what is the Vmiss running, so all these things, right? Similarly, the same things available here in the Nutanix so in the hyperflex as well.18:08So if you want to add some wizard, you can add it, so e.g., so you can add it whatever you want to add, right? So top five utilization or or capacity runaway, so you can just add its capacity runaway.18:26Right. Okay, so this is about the the dashboard side, right? Okay so next comes the hardware compla contact sorry compatibility list.18:42So this is a very interesting feature, so why, why it is very interesting feature. So whenever you whenever you are going through any security audit, your security team will ask you to you know they will they will be providing some reports where they will be saying.19:01Like so this this software is incompatible with this hardware.19:21So you need to upgrade this one because this might create the issue in securities in future it might be the issue for the security related vulnerabilities, right? So in that case, so you, you don't need to go and manually check what if what.19:25Is compatible or it's not compatible.19:45So there you will have this option where you can use this option and see which is in compliant, right? With the hardware and software. So e.g. here this server hardware is compliant with the server software, but there is a in compliance with the.19:48After site, so it will give you the visibility.20:08At the adopter level as well, right? So it not only gives you the incompatibility status, it will also give you the recommended version, so you can just click on this one and see what is the recommended version that needs to be upgraded.20:11In order to be compliant with the hardware and the software.20:30Right, so this is all about the HCL which is very useful for the complaints part before the before the security team reaches you, you can fix the complaints issues in your infrastructure, right?20:33So far I will be quickly going through one of the server. So in the server tab itself, you can see the HCL status, right? So in the HCL status, so we have incomplete, we have not evaluated, we have validated.20:51We have not listed, ok? So incomplete means there is not, you know, that there is a issue with the complaints, ok? So not listed means there is a issue with the complaints, but this is not listed in the Cisco's database.21:07And not evaluated, there is NO enough information, there is NO enough data to evaluate the HCL status and validated means everything is good. So hardware software and the adopters side the software compatibility is good, right?21:26So if you want to look at it any of this one, so I'm going to look at the not listed, so click on the not listed. So here you can see just click on any of the server.21:42And here you have HCL tab, right? Click on the HCL tab, and here you see, so I'm running the soft I'm running the server which is server model UCS 220M6 model, ok?22:01So which is running the server firmware 4.2. So which is compatible with the hardware. So that is why it is validated, right? So here you can see the soft server software complaints, so I'm running VS VMware ESXi.22:18Version 7.02 .22. So which is again the complaint version for this hardware, but I can see this the UCS ride and the the other adopter.22:33I'm running some different version, which is not, which is showing incompatible component for the driver, ok? So, so this is the issue I found. So if I want to see what is the recommended, so you can click on get recommended.22:50Server, ok. So here you can see so these are the these are the so I was seeing a issue with the ride, right? I also saw the issue with these components. So current version I'm running is this one and the recommended version is 7.7.23:07Two zero.23:27So if I upgrade to this version to all these adopters, then I will be compliant with the hardware and the software, right? So this is how the HCL will work. So this is a proactive approach, it will provide you the proactive information to to be compliant.23:28With the hardware and software in terms of the versions. Okay, so another interesting feature is the connected tag and the proactive RMA. So the traditional way of.23:48You know rising the tag case and collaborating with the tag team is something like you need to open a tag and you need to enter, you need to enter your details and manually collect the logs and upload those logs to Cisco. Then tags comes into picture, then they will analyze the lack logs and then call you, right? They will.24:06Will be calling you. But using the connector tag, you can open a case directly from the inter site and enter your system. So it will be redirected to the support case manager and that's all, right? So once you create the case.24:26Automatically the tag team will collect the tag because through the inter site, so in the backend they will have they will be collecting the the tech support bundle from your infrastructure. It's a kind of you know.24:43The back access to collect the tech support bundle, and then they will start analyzing, right? So you don't need to wait for the call, you don't need to wait for the call from this. So.25:02So they will be analyzing their logs and then they will be calling you back, right? So it will reduce the amount of time that is the customer wait time and the resolution times for the issues that is being raised to tag, right?25:17So another important feature is the proactive RMA so which is a default feature, so you don't need to enable anywhere this feature, right? So the only thing is you need to create some tags in order to receive the email, right?25:37So for the RMA, so if there is any issue found, ok? So this is about the connected tag, so how do you raise the connected tag, so I will just show you how do you raise the connected tag. So again you can go to the servers tab.25:52I hope that there are NO questions, I think the questions are all on chat is addressed, right? Am I audible?26:10Okay so I hope the questions are all addressed. Sure sure thank you thank you very. So you can select any of the servers so which needs to be in.26:31Okay, so here you can see there is an option to raise a tag case, ok? So you can click on this one, it will be redirected to redirected to support case manager.26:47Okay, so, so where you can provide the information and then submit the case, that's all.27:19So then the tag will automatically receive the case and they will start collecting the information from the inter site and then start collecting the tech support bundle and start working on the price. So this is how the connector tag will work.27:25Right? Okay, so now comes the so which is by default enabled provided you have the coverage, the support coverage for the hardware. So if there are any critical alarms related to the hardware.27:41So which will automatically raise the proactive RMA so that that will automatically trigger the alert to the tag and that you know in the back end system, automatically the proactive tag will be raised. So here you can see, so once that is raised you will be receiving this kind of email.27:58So where you will receive the email related to the hardware and the replacement defects. So this is how the tag the connected tag and the proactive RMA will work together. Okay.28:18So now we addressed the queries on the support coverage and is there any potential issues so all this stuff. So now comes the security parts, right? So is there any impacted advisories I.28:35My infrastructure has, so how do you address that question? Is there any end of life end of sale, information or the any any hardware is end of life and end of sale? It's about to end of life and end of sale information.28:52Yes. So sorry Naveen. There actually was a question regarding the end of life and and and and the future milestones regarding hyperflex. It's actually there in.29:09In the last screen, can you go back and the last screen the the end of sales end of life advisory will pop up showing you the exact information you need and which devices are impacted by this end of life.29:24Notification. So you can see all the details in Intersight.29:45Yes, please proceed. Yeah, so that's what I'll be showing now. So where you will see this icon, right? So this speaker icon, so this is where you will see the advisories, right? So it will look something like this or one of the advisories where it will provide you this.29:48Complete summary.30:08Of the advisory, so what is the affected device? And not only that, it will also provide you what is the workaround, what is the workaround or the solution, right? And the same page in the advisories you can see the end of life end of say where it was explaining.30:09So this is one of the advisories or the end of life end of sale advisory. So it's been announced for the blade server. So you can see what is the last date of support everything, so I'll be quickly showing you in the.30:29Intercite. So here you can see this is the speaker icon, right? So where you can see the security advisories we we have the not only the security advisory, we also have field notices. So if there is any field notices released by Cisco.30:46That it will be also available here, right? And the end of life advisories. Okay, so let's quickly go through the security advisories. So here you can see the description of the security advisory under related CVs that's associated with that advisories.31:03And what are the affected device and what is the last update on that advisories, right? So I'm just clicking one of the advisories here, which is related to. So there are some.31:23Multiple vulnerabilities for the same C which might allow a remote attacker to conduct cross site, right? So these are the CV IDs related to that vulnerability. So this was published on the 1 April and the last update was April 22.31:39So if you want to see the details so you can click on the details, this is where this advisory is posted. So you can click on that one and see, go through the advisory. Alright.31:59Okay, so next comes the workaround and the solution you can see what is the fixed release and what is the what is the fixed server? Fixed releases. So for UCS server, what is the fixed release?32:16So you can use this releases in order to mitigate this vulnerability, right? So next comes the end of life serve advisories, end of life advisories, as you said, you can see end of life advisories here.32:33For all the servers, right? So I'm just clicking, anyone. So it will give you the complete information so about the end of life.32:49And the end of sale, the complete roadmap, like when, when the announcement when when it was announced or when when was the last sale date, ship date, the service contract renewal date, last hardware support date.33:05Right, so what is the, what is the solution? So for this there is NO replacement, so you need to upgrade to the next hardware, right? So this is all about the advisories.33:20Okay, so this one I'm quickly go through because we have a separate session. So how do you 1st, how do you deploy your servers quickly? So we have profiles, we have policies which will be associated with the template.33:38So from the template, you can create profiles and then profiles can be associated with the hardware, right? So you can quickly see here under the configure tab, you can see the profiles available, so which is available for different options like.33:57So hyperflex hyperflex, UCS chassis, UCS domain profiles, server profile, and these are the templates, you can see from the templates you can create profiles, so these are the policies created.34:14And these are the pools created, right? So I'm just quickly going through because there is a separate session for this one, but just to you know notify notify you that we have an option for policy. So these policies are.34:30You know, for the UCS manager you cannot push the policy from the inter site because this is per domain basis. But for the IMM so which will be covered by the by Eric where you can push the policies from the inter site for the IMM servers.34:48IM managed servers and the UCS C series rack servers, right? So then comes the orchestration parts which is also available, so we have the workflows to create, to automate your deployment, right?35:04So you can create the profile, I mean you can create the workflows and to push the profile policies and you can install the OSs from the inter site itself. So we have different options. You can create compute resources, hyperflex, networking, storage.35:21So everything you can automate using the workflows. So the workflow will look something like this, so where you can use these different conditional tasks under the in order to push the configurations and the deployment.35:38Okay, so here comes the last part of my session, I mean the my part. So where we have newly introduced the power power metrics under the cooling metrics and the connectivity statuses, right?35:56So, you can go to dashboard again, so where you can see the power and energy metrics. So this will give you the complete picture of overall energy consumption of your infrastructure.36:12Not only the overall consumption but the every individual device like how many how many how much power is con some con consumed by the.36:30Rack server by the ok so we got the slider as well. Thank you very. So you can meanwhile go through the slider as well or you can I mean, I I just came up with this because.36:46It's kind of an interesting question because I'm building a health check report and this could be one of the checks that determines the threshold for the interval of an that that that an acknowledged alarm or advisory should ever exist before it becomes a problem.37:03Sure, sure, sure. Okay, please go ahead. Thank you. Thank you very. Okay, so you can see this power consumption status not only for the servers as well as we can see the fis as well, right?37:23The one day average, some day average, 30 day average. You can use this for managing your power consumption, right? So what are the top five servers which are consuming power? Most, most power cons consuming servers?37:38You can see the top five blade server, top five rack server, top five fis, right? So what is the historical power consumption for all these devices, right? So, yeah.37:56So similarly you can see the fabric you know the fabric interconnect matrix. So we here it will give you the the network utilization for the port level, right? So for each port.38:13How much network, how much is utilized, right? So this you can see and you can in case of any bottlenecks and your infrastructure in terms of the bandwidth utilization, is there any slowness so that might also be, you can see and.38:32Correlate that with your issues, right? Okay, so apart from that, we also have some connectivity related information for the fis, ok, so this is also newly introduced. You can click on the FI.38:51So which must be IMM managed so otherwise you will not get this topology information. So here this is one of the FI which is on the IMM mode. I'm just clicking on the topology, so you can see.39:11The topological view, so where it is connected on the upstream. So here you can see this topology under this is the interface I'm connected to my upstream. You can see the network utilization PXRX utilization, is there any.39:28Utilization or is there any CRC errors, buffer error collision, everything you can see here. Apart from that, you can see the network utilization. So similarly.39:48So here the network threshold it will provide you like if it is below 70 %, it is ok if it is more than 70 % it will provide you the warning. If it is more than 90 %, it will provide you the critical alert, right?40:06Yeah, so with this we are covered this part so we have covered all these day to day operational questions using the inter site, right?40:22Okay, let me pass the ball to Eric for taking you through the IMM and the Nutanix integration. Okay, thank you Eric. I mean you can let me share my screen now.40:38So, so, to the question, can you really claim other vendors nexus, not Nexus, network devices and intersight? No, under the target type.40:56You can find all the network supported network devices and only Cisco devices like MDS or Nexus or the, the controllers can be claimed in Intersight. I hope that answers your question.41:13And moreover, you can find more details in, in the help center just look for support targets.41:29Supported systems. Okay, under supported systems you see all the supported switches here in the matrix table.41:53And really I don't think there's any 3rd party nexus, network switches there. Yeah, so let's go to the presentation. So next.42:09Let's switch my.42:27Hold on a sec. Let me set up my. All right, it still looks weird. I don't know why I can see my mouse, but anyway, next.42:46Let's get into Intersight management or IMM, as as you see, IMM is written everywhere, IMM. So if you spend any time managing UCS, this is the direct.43:00Direction of things are gonna head. So it's worth understanding well rather than just you know just nodding along. So let's.43:20Let's 1st look at what actually it is. So what is IMM? So at, at its core, it's a, a new software stack for the fabric interconnect. So just think of it as an alternative solution to the traditional.43:33UCS manager, that you already know and instead of managing your F FI attached servers through UCS manager, which is XML based which I would probably cover it later, you're doing it through intersight.43:53Using the policy based management. The policy model configuration model is quite similar to UCS manager, but we're having kind of a different naming here and and some nuances in the worldwide names pools, e.g..44:10U.44:31But anyway, the why is the part? The why here is the part that was a quick pause here and because there are three reasons that we drive this change and 1st 1st of all, we, we want one consistent, one central.44:31All.44:51Management experience instead of having several different platforms like UCS central, UCS manager, UCS director, and we've really merged everything into, into one single platform. And secondly, we want a standardized.44:52This platform.45:12Underneath everything. Earlier, I mentioned the UCS manager is mostly XML based and now we're, we've adopted the the modern JSON and REST API architecture that's that has better extensibility that has more.45:13More possibility in the future to integrate more vendor devices, vendor platforms.45:33Introduce new features, we have all that possibilities now. And thirdly, we're, we're setting up for, for new architecture, again, new architectures down the road. So it's less about just replacing.45:40One platform with a new one, but it's it's about how to not paint ourselves into the corner as our hardware platforms evolve. So the next.45:56Slide. Now this, this diagram looks kind of busy but, but the idea is simple. So there are a few ways you see it as gets managed today and you've got C series standalones.46:15You've got the traditional UCS domain with a UCS manager doing all the configuration and operations, and then the modernized path, where Intersight steps in. So the key takeaway here is in Intersight.46:34In Intersight managed mode, Intersight handles everything, both configuration and operations directly from from the controller to the device.46:52And in the traditional UCSM MODE, if you will. You claim the UCS manager in the Intersight and you can only operate on it. You cannot configure, you cannot push configuration from intersight, directly to the devices. You still.47:07Manage the the the policy constructs locally on UCS manager. And you, you lose a lot of the the amazing features that you can leverage in intersight. And most of all, you can manage one domain at a time, only one domain at a time on UCS manager.47:25And maybe a few more domains in UCS central, but you you you manage everything of different types in inner site. So you don't have to worry about, you know, hopping between platforms and this is one of the biggest advantages.47:45And, this comprehensive table, and honestly it speaks for itself. The left column is what you get in IMM and the right is UCSM, and notice how much.48:04Only exists in IMM, like the cloud controller, the south version or the, the virtual appliances are connected or private, the X series GPU blade.48:20The rest rest based API I will talk about this later in detail and the the VMware integration, the multi domain management, as I mentioned, like, the, the improved change control like when you deploy something you.48:36When you change some configurations, in a profile that's already deployed to a server, you can, you can change the configuration 1st and you'll see.48:56The status change to not deployed because there's a configuration drift and you just wait until your maintenance window and and deploy the changes, and everything all the life cycle can be monitored and controlled on inter site and and also.49:07Like OS install which is an advanced feature Intersight that that's simply not available in UCSM in blade support X series blade support, et cetera et cetera. But this one here is the only one.49:27That exists between the two worlds because a lot of customers complain, hey, I'm I'm so used to using UCSM and and I do want to buy your X series servers, can I use the UCS UCSM for this? Well, back in the days.49:45When Intersight was not so great, we, we kind of like compromised and, you know, just introduced this backward compatibility. But, but nowadays as Intersight is pretty mature and UCSM is going.50:03End of sale soon, so, I I I still strongly recommend encourage you to, to migrate FROM to IMM to leverage the amazing features that's there.50:23So here's the the practical part, how you actually stand this up, how you actually deploy the the IMM mode step by step, and so 1st you you start with the initial.50:41FI setup.50:59And you pick the inter site managed mode. So this is done in the, in the CLI. You have to you know do factory reset and during the initialization, you you choose inter site as the managed mode instead of UCSM.51:01And then do all the rest configurations and boot it up and and then you claim it claim the FI pair to inter site via the the device console. Now, you don't have UCS manager after booting up. You instead you see.51:20The device console. And in that console there's something like device connector which you can use for claiming the domain in your inner site and then you create a domain profile and deploy it.51:40The profile to it, to the fis. Until then, you can start seeing your, your, your servers and your chassis being discovered because you need that configuration.51:54In place in order to be able to access the the servers and chassis connected down the server port et cetera. And then you, you, you can start creating the server policies, profiles, templates, and pools, and deploying them.52:09To the actual chassis and servers. Well, that's possible. You can, and you and you probably should reprovision all of the domain profile templates.52:27Policies and pools along with the chassis ones and the server ones all together before your device is even shipped, before it's even arrived, before it's even installed. So you can.52:42Pre pre configure everything and when it's when it's about time you deploy everything all at once and that's generally what we do as a best practice.52:58So let me, and and really well now we've come to know that a lot of the discovery and claiming is it is automatic and and your job is mostly.53:15The policy work, that being said, to do you really have to, you know, create like all the configurations manually, including dozens of ports and, and port roles, hundreds of VLANs in the policy and all.53:32That's not really, that's not likely the case because next I'm gonna show you a quick demo about how we can automate the creation of hundreds of profiles like thousands or even more VLAN.53:52And.54:11Probably in a couple minutes using automation via the the official Cisco Intersight Terraform provider, and this is honestly this is part of the puzzle. This is not the whole picture, and in reality you would use CICB pipe.54:13Lines you will leverage a lot of the tools to achieve this in production, but I'm just gonna show you how it works generally. So.54:33So I'm not gonna walk you through every single detail about the code base, but, just let's start with like terraform playing and Terraform apply directly so we can see the effect in action.54:43So I, just, just a side note, I wrapped everything, all the commands in in the make file. So we in instead of running Terraform plan or Terraform apply, we're actually running make plan, so that's a side note. So anyway, it starts initializing the terraform runtime.54:58It starts planning for the changes based on the input parameters that we provided in the code.55:19And, now it's validating and then it's gonna, it's gonna run the plan and here you you can see that there there are 398 changes pending to be made.55:27And next, if we run the the plan apply command, it's gonna actually apply it or push all the configurations that are planned into intersight. So if we.55:46Look at the logs live. We're gonna see a lot of changes being made simultaneously. You can see that a ton of resources are being created and it's so quick. It's so quick. If you have a well, well coded.56:02Set up using terraform or Ansible or just simply Python. You can repeat the same process. You can use the same template over and over again whenever you need to deploy new domains.56:22And and new servers and chassis. So, so in in this example we actually have like five different domains and around 800 servers, which is crazy, but I just, I just did it for, for, for the.56:38Proof of concept purpose and and you can see it it takes only a few minutes to complete all the 500 profile creation along with a thousands of of VLAN ports and port roles and and and the resource pools.56:56And and and and really you cannot do this without Intersight because again, Intersight is a modern management platform that allows you to access a rich set of, you know, API endpoints and a rich set of SD.57:12Case that are available for download and use, so I I strongly encourage you that you, you migrate your existing domains and.57:32UC from UCSM to IMM to leverage all of these amazing benefits. So yeah, with that, let's go to the next chapter, which is.57:43So now you're sold on IMM but but you've got existing UCSM manager domains and you wanted to do it, you wanted to migrate it. How how do you get there?58:04Without, you know, re rebuilding everything by hand, and that's what the transition tool is used for. So let's walk through it and see what it is. So before, before the tool.58:18There's a document that I want to share with you regarding the, the complete conversion or migration, if you will, the procedures step by step, so.58:37So that's in my opinion it's better than just one slide here, but this is just an overall for you to understand what are the general steps that you're gonna take in order to migrate this. So 1st you're gonna verify the supportability, of course, and then you, you, you upgrade your FI servers chassis and iOS.58:54To to IMS supportive firmware, and how are you gonna figure that out? I mean, how can I go back?59:15So, luckily, luckily, you either verify that in the documentation using the UCS, HCL tool online. There's a webpage there or.59:24Intersight does a better job of this with the HCL feature. So you, if you have claimed that that the servers, the domains into Intersight already in UMN.59:41Mode and you want to verify whether or not your firmware are compatible, your drivers are compatible, then just simply use the HCL feature to check your hardware, software operating system actually and the all the adapter firmware and driver versions and.59:55If you can't figure it out, just click on the get recommended drivers.01:00:15Button and then you you're gonna select your target OS and just see what drivers he recommends and once you have everything validated according to this according to the document, you're good to go.01:00:20And, next, you decommission all the servers chassis and and and fabric standards. You unclaim the existing domain from Intersight and you you raise the configuration on both fis.01:00:37Remember the 1st step of the workflow that here, you, you initialize your fis, you select the IMM mode. So this happens after the erase, and then you configure the fis for the inter site managed mode along with the initialization configurations.01:00:56And you claim the fis into Intersight via the the new device console. And then lastly you apply all the pre configured or you can create on the run or you can use the IMN transition tool.01:01:16To to provision all the configurations and deploy them. So luckily since we have our transition tool, we don't need to manually create everything, all the configurations from based on the existing UCSM.01:01:34Policy will simply use a tool to you know connect to the UCS manager, and pull the configurations, analyze it, whether or not it's ready.01:01:53There's a readiness access assessment report and then we'll, you know, just use the tool to convert the configuration and then push it to intersight. And that's, that's gonna be streamlined by the tool.01:02:09So the primary use cases are, there, there are three main reasons people use this tool. I'm gonna show you the 4th. So 1st, you're gonna use it to accelerate the X series deployments. It attends you.01:02:25Your existing service profile templates converts the related policies and then brings over your fabric configurations like your, your VLANs vsans, and ports. And and then secondly.01:02:45You would use it to move your existing servers to IMM domains. What's amazing about this is, it's it's able to keep all the servers identities in the identities pools like.01:03:00And max, like worldwide port names, worldwide NO names, something like that. It can, it can even let you jump to a new server generation during the process. And then thirdly.01:03:16You can migrate it in an entire UCS domain to IMM, and this is the the full conversion that requires you know domain downtime and the tool handles all the operations step by step. I'm gonna show you that in the demo.01:03:32So, let's let's use this quick video to show to showcase the the overall process and see it in action. And if you open the.01:03:49If you open the IMM transition tool, the 1st thing you're gonna see is the the history of changes or what's new, if you will. And.01:04:08And then you just download, download it, deploy it as an OVA, or download the upgrade package, and fast forward, it's just an OVM, it's nothing complicated, so I'm I'm gonna skip it.01:04:26Once that's done, there are a few tabs you're gonna see here. 1st one is called transition. This is where you create the transitions. And, 2nd one is device management where you claim the UCS manager here, you claim the.01:04:46The Intersight account here, so you you established the connections with the platform so you can pull and push configurations, right?01:05:06So in order to do that, in order to claim inter site account here, you, you gotta create a key pair in Intersight and use that key pair to authenticate to Intersight account. And if you need, let me show you the live page.01:05:17And if you need to, what's the password? And if you need to configure proxy in order to access intersight SaaS, e.g., you you need to configure it here and that's pretty easy.01:05:35And.01:05:55To to add a device or add inter site account or UCS manager or UCS central CIMC et cetera, you just select the appropriate target, whether it's SaaS or virtual appliance. If it's SaaS, you enter the API key and secret key direct.01:05:59And toggle the use proxy toggle here and it's gonna connect to that account and just in case you don't know how to create a key, so you just search keys and then you generate API key, give it a name.01:06:19Schema of version three and set set set an expiration time and generate, generate. It's gonna generate that key pair and you're gonna save this secret key somewhere because you're, you're never gonna be.01:06:38Able to see it on the GUI for a second time. And that's it. It's pretty simple, and then you use that key to connect to your IMN transition tool and that's it.01:06:56And then fast forwarding, we're gonna create a transition to migrate this particular domain to IMM.01:07:15So 1st we're gonna unclaim this device because it's already there under the system targets, we'll just click on the three.menu and then unclaim.01:07:31And then from here we can, from the device connector, we can see the connection that has been disconnected, but it's still able to access internet waiting to be claimed again.01:07:54And here specifically before we we connect the UCSM and pull all the configurations, convert them and push them, we need to add an encryption key for the locally authenticated users, and this this is a.01:08:12New requirements it wasn't there before. I guess it's because we we gotta preserve the the the user credentials and and all during the transition.01:08:32And here you have a bunch of options. You can generate a readiness assessment report. So you can see whether or not the current domain is ready for a transition. And you can generate a report while.01:08:44Pushing configuration to Intersight and you can do, this is a new feature. You can do in place UCS domain migration now. You you you don't need to do out of place migration anymore. You can just do it directly within the domain. And then you can clone Intersight.01:09:00Configuration from SAS to virtual app accounts to to virtual appliance and from virtual appliance to, to SaaS, e.g..01:09:20And you you can also upload upload configuration and push to intersight. If you have a JSON configuration file, you can upload it and push it. Now, this is, this is actually something very interesting I'm gonna show it to you beside the the main story.01:09:33So.01:09:54Besides the, domain configuration, the migration, et cetera, you can actually use this connectivity to your inter site account and download all of the configurations into a JSON file. And then once you have the, the file, you.01:09:56You can use that JSON.01:10:15To, to, to analyze what, how exactly you can automate those configurations. We are in the AI error now. You can just throw it into an agent and just let it analyze your existing configurations and.01:10:17And e.g., if you want to automate the land connectivity policy creation and you it it's very hard for you to figure out the the directly referenced and indirectly referenced objects in the backend, so you can just.01:10:37Throw the the complete configuration dump to it and ask it to, to analyze it for you. And this is honestly very helpful whenever you want to to do automation using Intersight and you can't figure out the relationship between the object.01:10:54Checks in the back end. I'm not sure if I can track it over to show you.01:11:14Alright, alright this is the the the one that I just dumped. So it's kind of interesting, you know, it's a different experience compared to see.01:11:26All these objects on the front end. And in here you just see all the blades, the blade name, the serial numbers, slot ID, you can see everything in a structural way and it's just again it's throw it to, to the AI agent is boom, it's gonna do everything.01:11:40For you, right? That's, that's one of the things that I would do besides migrating domains using this tool. I I really previously when I worked with a customer.01:11:59On on an automation POC, I just simply asked him, can you dump your configuration via the migration tool when he did it and I was able to give him what he wanted very quickly because I have I have all the configurations I don't need to guess, right?01:12:13All right, so let's go back to the migration and just just give it a name, any name at all. Alright.01:12:30This is where you need to select either an existing UCS manager that's already connected here as a device or you, you just create one here on the go. And you refresh, it's gonna pull the config Whenever you hit that, it's gonna synchronize the config.01:12:50From that controller to your current.01:13:10Current OVA is it's fetching the SDK configuration objects that there's the operational logs and you can see what it does because it's gonna take few minutes and then you will be able to, you'll have plenty of options to.01:13:15To maneuver.01:13:35The, the, the migration as to how you want to deal with the convert policy conversion because it's gonna convert from the XML based configuration objects to the JSON based objects and there's there there are nuances.01:13:37Between the two platforms in terms of the, the structure.01:13:56In terms of the relationship between objects, so you need to, you can either, you know, do do it all by default or you can tweak it. Like always create separate VLAN policies, always create separate port policies et cetera. You have the options.01:14:01And regarding fabric, which is the FI regarding the servers, what, what, what, what can you do? And you can even create automatic tags to the converted objects.01:14:20This, these will be added to all the objects you created in Intersight. All right, just a bunch of advanced options we, but you usually you, you would not use them.01:14:37And next you will select the service profiles and templates in UCSM, and this is gonna be a mapping. You're you're gonna match between organizations.01:14:55Like in UCSM it's called root and in inter site we call it default, where you can create more UCS organizations or more inter site organizations that do the mapping between the two systems and and the tool is gonna handle.01:15:12Where exactly the convert objects come from and should be put into, it's generating the.01:15:30The readiness report.01:15:50For you to review the, whether or not yours your system is ready for migration, and there will be errors and warnings for you to review and and fix if if feasible.01:15:53And and this is the step that's gonna start pushing the converted configuration.01:16:20And then you will have, you will also have the option to to download a backup, and again the JSON that the configurations can be used for backup purposes as well as for, for automation purposes.01:16:27See this is when you can download the backup and now it's batching backup from the UCS system.01:16:53And, and then it's gonna proceed to the real deal. It's gonna start erasing the system, the servers, the th the fabric interconnects.01:17:09It's it's NO longer just a conversion tool for the config logical configurations. It's also able to do actual erase initial setup et cetera, from within the tool.01:17:25All right, next Steve, so before you proceed, you've got to verify something something and it's gonna, you're gonna have that button to erase configurations.01:17:50That was, that was warning because the servers were not powered off and you need to go ahead and power them off so the the the wizard can continue. Alright, now everything's got a green check mark. We can erase the configuration.01:18:17And after that, we're gonna log into the CLI after the erase and reboot and we'll, we'll go ahead and select inter site managed mode. It's rebooting.01:18:34Alright, here, here upon initialization, select console and then instead of UCSM, now we're choosing Intersight and and fill in the rest of the details.01:19:01And after.01:19:37The initialization on reboot. Again, we will NO longer have UCS manager as the user interface it will it will change to device console, which is a simplified version. You can do simple stuff. You can view the inventory, you can.01:19:39You can see the device connector in there and you can also collect log files for just in case any issue happens because, once.01:19:58Something happens to intersight or intersight virtual appliance, you're gonna need somewhere to to collect the log files to provide to to the tech engineers, right? So that that interface is basically used for that. And now it's the deployment kicks off.01:20:14Off it's just.01:20:33Just a long wait, for the deployment of the domain profiles and policies and then the discovery of the servers, and then deploying the profiles and policies and pools to the servers and then we're done with that.01:20:36So that's basically the the complete process. Going back to this slide, we are gonna, gonna end the presentation with the last chapter, which is.01:20:55Nutanix integration and let's see how these two things come together. So, when you get out of the integration, what you get out of it is, is.01:21:12Mostly, a global visibility across all your clusters and unified alarms and and license compliance views and full life cycle management. I'm gonna talk about that later. That's generally.01:21:29Operated with new tags.01:21:49Between Nutanix and Intersight and and the operations built to to stay future ready and the AI error framing aside you know the practical value is is is one pane of glass over your, all of your Nutanix asset.01:21:51It's worth noting that, that the visibility that we talk about is.01:22:12Bi directional. Meaning you can see some of the infrastructure stuff, the metadata and the metric from Nutanix, and vice versa, you can you can also see some Nutanix information on Intersight.01:22:17And and more importantly, you can leverage the API level integration to do the, what we call the end to end automation with Intersight being the only supported.01:22:35Option on Nutanix. What do I mean by that? I'm not saying you can't run Nutanix on other vendors devices like HPE, but Intersight here is the only one that's strategically and programmatically integrated with it.01:22:52What do I mean by that? If you need some kind of just proof for that, you can go ahead and search it on the Nutanix API documentation. And here you, e.g., you will search by Intersight, you'll find that.01:23:12Actually, inter site is the only supported managed hardware manager here. There's NO other value supported here. Intersight is the only option and if you go to the.01:23:31Foundation central, e.g., in Nutanix, and there's a foundation central settings, you can see.01:23:48Intersight is the only, it's the only hardware provider that can be claimed here, used for the life cycle management used for the deployment of the Nutanix clusters. There's NO other options. That's what I meant.01:24:03We'll come to this later, but, again, the, the enhanced and and enriched bi directional visibility, so you will, you will be able to see and leverage the.01:24:22Existing HCL compliance checks feature, firmware upgrade features, always install features, all the advanced things, you, you can leverage those on your Nutanix nodes.01:24:39Because we have the integration and honestly this is really cool because, if you, if you, if you try to automate the new tennis cluster creation and all the deployments there on HPE, e.g..01:24:55It's probably, I'm not gonna say it's impossible, but it's really, really, really hard. But we're able to integrate Intersight with foundation central. And and then.01:25:14Let me show you that, connection name. And with that, really disable it. I'm not allowed to create.01:25:30More than three keys, so I'm deleting it.01:25:49So Nutanix foundation central, give it a an expiration expiration date and I give it.01:25:54Alright, and generate, use the public key public key here and the secret key there, give it a name.01:26:10I'm not gonna download it, you know, just a demo, go to account details, give it a meaningful name and connect. And once we have that connection in place, we can, we can discover the nodes in intersight.01:26:30That's basically the UCS server that we have claimed in our inter site for management. And instead of auto discovery or fully manual onboarding, we'll onboard the nodes simply via the integration here.01:26:51So the the discovery part is really simplified and here e.g. standalone mode and I'll see, I'll be able to see the the nodes that are available there in inner side account. Let's go and see.01:27:08So maybe the where's the measurement standalone.01:27:27Okay, so CX lab UCS seven.01:27:47There, here it is. This is one of the I'm not gonna show you all all the four servers here, but you get the idea we can discover the servers from Intersight to Nutanix via the integration, and we can onboard them.01:27:55And from there, we'll just create cluster. And this gets to an even better part be because technically you can still fill in all the information here for the cluster.01:28:12Your name, AOs hypervisor hypervisor, whether it's HB or ESX or and you fill in all the network settings and C CVM settings configured all the nodes.01:28:31You cannot do this stuff manually, but since we have the integration and we want to automate from end to end, we can use this foundation central APIs, we can, you know, maybe I'll just feel like kicking off a.01:28:44A cluster creation request completely based on JSON data that I've prepared that I created as a template for all of my clusters. I can do it from here. So I'll fire the request from, I'll send the request to the foundation central, which in.01:29:00In Turn uses the inter site APIs to send a request of creating all the profiles and policies and both in intersight. So everything will be automated. And that seems really cool to me.01:29:20So yeah, this is one side of the integration between the two systems. And on the other side is the device connector that we've been talking about again and again. So here in marketplace, if you search.01:29:34By foundation not foundation device connector it's kind of stuck alright.01:29:53Device connector from Cisco Intersight, you get it.01:30:14Install it as, as a plugin, and then you open it, it's gonna look like exactly the same as in UCFM as in CIMC everywhere. So you, whatever you want to connect a device to intersight, you just use this thing. And here you can see it's already.01:30:18Claimed to intersight. And with that, you will be able to see some stuff from the Nutanix clusters, right? This kind of answers the previous question with some visual.01:30:38Reference, right? You why why does the Nutanix cluster tab exists while, while the storage does not well simply because we just claimed it. And here if you click on one of the clusters, you will be able to see the storage utilization in terabytes.01:30:57Well, in Nutanix, from their point of view, it's gonna be percentage and and see all the notes on the license violations, the node details. And if you click this, you'll you'll be redirected to the server details.01:31:17The virtual machines that's running on it.01:31:37And the GPUs of any. So on the flip side of the world, you'll see, under infrastructure a lot of details will be.01:31:42Would be able to see here from Nutanis perspectives regarding the computes servers, the network related stuff. And this is this will serve as a good compliment to what Nutanis is natively supported.01:31:58But anyway, that's just a very quick touch on, on the integration because due due to the time limits we we can just cover every single feature, go to every single page and talk about it for you. Well, in, in the future we might have sessions like that.01:32:20But, I guess this is it. Our times run up.01:32:38Yeah, that's that's it for my presentation today. Thank you everyone. Thank you. Thank you Eric for the great demo on the IAM under the inter site Nutanix integrations. So I hope that helps the customer to start with IM IMM under the Nutanix integration.01:32:45So yeah, so I got on questions on the chat like related to the documentation. Can you please work on that one? And meanwhile, I will I'm going to share a quick video on how you can use the inter site to maximize the benefits so it will be a quick.01:33:04Run like 1 min video it will be the end of the session.01:33:24Ready to master your data center, let's optimize your operations with Cisco Intersight. Start by planning your architecture, create your account, link your smart license, and claim your targets to build a solid foundation.01:33:34Here, we explore the licensing dashboard within intersight. As you can see, it includes details such as the last synchronization time, smart account information, and virtual account status. Notably, this system aids in managing compliance efficiently, alerting to any issues promptly such as the disabled subscription information shown.01:33:50Operationalize your infrastructure by claiming your UCS and HX devices. Make Intersight your daily hub, log in frequently to monitor health, manage policies, and keep your compute environment running at peak performance. Displayed here are the alarms within the Intersight system.01:34:11This feature enables administrators to monitor severity levels of various alerts, ensuring swift identification and response to critical issues such as those listed. This proactive approach enhances system reliability and security. Move to proactive monitoring. Acknowledge advisories, create custom policies, and manage pro.01:34:28Profiles to ensure peak performance.01:34:48Finally, reach the advanced features, update firmware, install HX, and aim for 50 % device coverage to fully leverage your investment. Consistency is key. Log in regularly, monitor your environment, and transform your data center operations today.01:34:52Yeah, so that was the end of the session. So thank you everyone for joining this session. I I wanted to try and look for the documents as as in the chat, but looks like we don't have time for that. So we'll we'll we'll send you an email if possible after the session.01:35:12And to the last question, does this workflow work with Cisco Blades X series? Yes, of course.01:35:32Well, it doesn't, it doesn't work for HPE blades. That's what I can tell you. Based on my knowledge, they did a few, a few months ago. I I don't know if they changed anything in a few months, but according to my knowledge HPE doesn't support it. We did, we did. We, we do, we, we do.01:35:40So, anyway, thank you for your questions.01:36:00And we look forward to seeing you in the future. Ah, thank you. So, yeah, quick reminder, we have a session two on the inter site on the next thursday. So please will meet you on the next Thursday. Thank you. Thank you, everyone.01:36:04