Intersight Compute: Quick Recap and Live Q&A

Hello everyone and welcome to today's EIS session. Today we're going to be going over a compute recap and some live Q and A.00:10My name is Riley Nors and I'll be the moderator for today's session. I am joined by three fellow csss that are gonna walk us through today's best practices. They are Joe Francis, Steven Mena, and Alan Clark. So as we get started here, I would encourage everyone to go ahead and join our.00:20If possible, we just have one quick poll question to kick kick things off, and it's where you joining from today?00:40The code and passcode to join the session are gonna be IMM 07:21 seven-twenty one being today's date. I would encourage you all to join and you can ask any questions you have in here and we will try to answer them all live during the session.00:46If we do not have time, we'll have an open Q and A at the end of the session as well. So if you can, please join the Slido and ask your questions in there. If not, you can utilize the chat panel on the right and we will try to get back to you through that as soon as we can as well.01:04I see a couple from Atlanta and North Carolina RTP, Florida, myself, and Joe and Alan are in the RTP area as well.01:25Awesome, looks like everyone's got their Slido working. I know we've got a lot to cover today, so let's go ahead and kick things off. So for today's agenda, we are going to get started with a getting started section with folks.intersight. We're gonna dive into some IMM key features followed by some IMM configurations. We're then gonna look at my.01:43Creating the inter site using the inter site transition tool.02:03Some new inter site updates with what's to do with Intersight and then wrap things up with Splunk integration with Intersight. So with that being said, I'll pass it to you Alan, you can go ahead and get things started for us. Alright, thank you Riley. So the 1st session we kind of we.02:06Good as part of this series was our getting started. So we'll take a quick look at that.02:26With Intersight management with Intersight it's kind of intersight's there to help you answer critical questions quickly, right? This is kind of our default dashboard. You're gonna see things like server health, HCI HCL compatibility.02:33Inventory breakdown, the version compliance. Hopefully, you know, when you look in your environment, you have slightly less versions than the couple of dozen we have already in our lab. You can see contract status out for the next 1236 60 months.02:48And you're you'll see your license compliance as well. You can see here kind of we have everything in advantage in this this particular example. The other things we really went through with our getting started is kind of how you actually get started with intersight. And the 1st step to that is really.03:03I'm Picking your deployment model and with intersight, we have three main, our three models. One is the full inner site SaaS, this is you're going to intersight.com, you're gonna go ahead and add all of your devices there as targets, and you're gonna manage everything through there. So you're not having to manage a, inner site itself, that's all managed by.03:20Else here at Cisco, you're just kind of attaching your devices to it. And then we have our two appliance options. One is a connected appliance where you'll deploy either a single VM or a cluster of Vmiss depending on which model, which way you're going and what scale you're looking at.03:40And then those Vmiss will connect back to, to Cisco to our inter site cloud instance, but you'll actually log into the virtual machine and all of your devices are connected there and managed that way. The tethering there is really to get.03:58Updates for things like field notices, security advisories, kind of there's a way to do automated updates for the virtual appliance itself, so we'll just download an update on a cadence. And then our last option there for our, you know, air gap customers is the private appliance.04:13So that's everything is ran locally within that appliance, so you can deploy it as a single node or as a cluster depending on your scale, and then you attach, you'd add your targets there. Everything runs through the private appliance. There's some additional management that that has to go on there with the private appliance. You kind of have to do your own upgrades.04:30You have to transfer over the metadata files for field notices, for security and advisories and that sort of thing.04:50You know, but that gives you that full air gapped experience for the customers that really need that. The next thing we really looked at is kind of the licensing model and when we get to license options with intersight, there's essentials and advantage and it's just.04:58Which set of features do you get on which license? So with essentials, you're gonna get your monitoring, your global inventory, fully customizable dashboards what you're used to with UCS, which is the policy based configs, profiles, templates.05:13Firmware management, HCL for compliance to drivers firmware, the operating systems. You get some 3rd party server operations as long as they comply with that red, the redfish standard API. You get backwards compatibility with UCS manager.05:30And you do when you're using the SAS or the connected virtual appliance, you get the proactive support. So it's proactive RMA connected TAC advisories, and you also get the sustainability features so a lot of power policy management.05:46There, there's actually some new features there. I think we talk about the the what's new for really managing power as well. Advantage gives you a couple additional features installation automation is probably the biggest one there really for most of the customers I work with and the ITSM integration, so ServiceNow integration.06:02As well as some, some ecosystem operation integration. So you're adding your nexus, your MDS, your 3rd party storage, hybrid cloud stuff, so you're adding your hypervisor and you can even add your automation endpoints like Ansible terraform. And then we have our workflow designer to do kind of a.06:22A little bit of a low code automation as well that's kind of available in that in that advantage tier. And the the other thing we really wanted to focus on when we were getting started is.06:40What you should do when you start your inter site deployment and whether it's setting up your organization. Unlike say UCS manager or UCS central, there, there's NO real hierarchy in intersight. It's a flat structure, and we're kind of creating a logical container, so.06:56An organization is, you know, the container for your pools, your policies, your profiles, you can create things called resource groups, which is where you group your, your actual physical resources, so server store storage, hypervisors, whatever you added as a target.07:13And then those resource groups that kind of belong to the organizations, and then you can stack your back but your roles based access control on top of that. So you can actually give users different sets of privileges within different organizations. One of the things we run into a lot with customers is.07:32They kind of put everything in default at the start, and then they come back later after they've added, you know, a dozen servers or a dozen domains or in the case of one customer we're actually working with right now, they've added 700 servers now they're going back and reorganizing it.07:48So we'd like to talk to you, all of you that are kind of proactive as like think about this organization when you start and it does make it a little bit easier than having to go back and do it kind of after the fact. So that is kind of the the basis for what I've got here on getting started. You know, pick out your deployment model.08:03Connected virtual appliance or private virtual appliance. Determine which license tier works best for you to the advantage and then think about how you wanna organize all the equipment and not only the equipment but the people in your organization and how that should map out when you're kind of getting going within your site.08:24Kinda smooth out that whole process. We do have a couple of questions we gotta get asked on this. I think probably the most frequent one is how do I start an inter site account? And these ways just go to inter site.com and select.08:42Don't have an account, create an account, and it should be a series of prompts there that you gotta work through that to set up your account and get ready and get going. See, and then with the licensing, can we move licenses as we decommission servers? The answer to that is also yes, we've got.09:01A lot of customers are in that migration process now coming off the M five and going to M seven or M eight. The licenses can be moved off of one server and onto another when I do decommission those old servers, so you don't really have to worry too much about that as long as you keep your active server count.09:20And your license count, you know, in sync. So with that said, I'm actually gonna go ahead and turn this over to Joe. He's gonna go through some, some key features that are available here in Intersight. Take it away Joe. Excellent. Thank you very much Alan.09:36For our audience, if you were able to join these previous sessions live, this will be a good recap for you and the ability to allow you to ask questions either in our Slido or Webex chat.09:53Preferably Slido. For those folks that couldn't attend the original, this will be, a good overview of what we covered. You can always go back and watch the recording. I think we'll put a link to the to the page where you can find the recordings and chat later.10:07For that, let me get started on a couple of the sessions that I had presented earlier, and what we will do is start with IMM.10:26Intersight managed mode. Key features and functionality. So if you can see our slide deck there, on our 1st slide here, we have inter site managed mode configuration features and one of the biggest ones, large topic to understand, get your head around.10:42Intersite managed mode.11:02That it's gonna translate what what you may have previously done in UCS manager, in their site managed mode is going to be a profile now for you. Your your domain is gonna be an IMM domain now and hosted in a profile configuration.11:04And of course with that profile, you're gonna have policies attached for that to help you organize, sort and configure your environment. Now one of the big questions that we wanna ask answer up front is yes, in inter site managed mode, you can have multiple.11:24IMM domains for that. If you've got settings or other reasons to separate your your domains there, you can simply configure a new IMM profile for new domain.11:43Now when you approach inter site managed mode, you do want to have a good mindset going in towards scalability because it's so much more scalable than previous environments that you maybe used to.11:58And what you really want to do is go forward with creation of templates, both for your profiles, for your chassis, as well as your profile for your servers that's included but not, not listed here on the slide. And of course your domain like we talked about.12:15For your IMM domains. You also want to utilize cloning in addition to templates so that you can maintain consistency, reduce workload.12:32Cut down with a number of inadvertent changes or profile drift, as we've called it in the past. If you want to have a golden template there, you can come back in and clone that to a new policy, new profile.12:48And be able to carry on those known good settings to new parts of your environment. And with Intersight managed mode, you also gain the ability now to share configurations across orgs. Alan touched on this towards the end of his last presentation.13:05And inter site managed mode two, a new functionality piece has been released. You can view your changes prior to deployment, that will help you gauge the impact of that, give you any, any.13:23Status updates on has it been deployed? Has it not? Is the reboot gonna be required? Is it not? That's often a big question. And if you can see my screen, we'll move on to the next slide.13:42And we'll look at the configuration sharing across orgs for this. Again, this topic that Alan briefly covered in his prior session, you can take a little deeper dive here.14:00CSAO or configuration sharing across orgs directly addresses desires some customers with large organizations and let you apply your RBAC.14:16Rule based access control appropriately across your network design or your large scale enterprises and managed service providers and help you minimize policy sprawl by reason those.14:33Both profiles and policies. Now an organization has the ability to share configuration resources such as policies, profiles pools, in addition to templates and operating system installation resources from one organization to another.14:50Within the same account that you have. Examples of what you can share. Again, your operating system image links, your server configuration utility links.15:10As well as any files associated or needed by an operating system configuration. As you can see, the idea here is to create a source org where kind of your your golden images would be stored.15:26Maybe your templates clone those, even if you have to start with a known good working server, clone the template up to your source org, and any policies you create in your source org, you can then redeploy to what we call a consumer based org.15:41Consumer org consumer of those policies, e.g., the BIOS policy there you see. And this enables you as an administrator to centralize some of your common configuration resources that you have within a central source.15:561st org making it easier for multiple consumer organizations to access and utilize the shared resources efficiently. The benefit of this approach is that it simplifies your management by reducing duplication and facilitating consistent configurations.16:16Across your organizations. To help you get your head around this, I've got a couple of links that I'm going to put in chat. One explains the configuration sharing across orgs CSAO.16:33That is found in the help or intersight. And that's not to be underrated. Help feature is very good. Let me get the link posted in.16:51There's a white paper there that I just put in chat, take a look at that if you can, and I'll get one from the help right behind it.17:14Let me get that link updated and there's a link for configuration sharing. Take a look at both of those. We still got some time left in today's.17:33Session, you'll be able to ask questions about it and with that being said, we'll move on to another prior session that we had inter site managed mode configuration policy.17:48And profile best practices. Now with this we studied the inter site managed mode components, come familiar with those if you have done already. Now these three main components.18:03Is what you can build with Intersight profiles, of course templates, get your domain profile, chassis profile, and server profile, as a domain profile configures a fabric interconnect pair through reusable policies.18:23That's for configuration of the ports and port channels. That's where you go to configure your VLANs and your vsans within your network, who defines the characteristics of and configures ports.18:43On your fabric interconnects so some examples of what you can configure there, as we said, your VLANs or vsans, individual ports, your management such as your NTP settings.18:59This log settings et cetera, as well as any QoS policies there. Now when you create profiles for your chassis, you can enable.19:18Chassis profile and associated chassis with it after you've claimed it within Intersight. So the chassis profile is associated, Cisco Intersight automatically configures the chassis to match the configuration specified in the policies of chassis profile.19:37I'm gonna move on and talk about server profiles. This is where you can enable resource management by streamlining policy alignment and con server configuration where you can create server profiles using the server profile wizard, which helps you through just a couple of steps.19:57So you can import the configuration details of an existing C series server. This is standalone mode, as well as a FI attached servers in inter site managed mode directly into.20:15Intersight from the server IMC. You can create server profiles using the server profiles wizard. Again, just a couple of easy steps. And in the end, you're gonna have a much smoother deployment of.20:30Your server environment and eliminate typical failures that might be caused by inconsistent configuration. That'll be the management for your compute, as well as your storage there.20:47And the network settings on those devices. There's some examples of what you can figure there, your buyer settings, boot order, KBM access or storage, some of your SD card settings, any raid configurations.21:04And for network what you configure are your LAN and SAN connectivity options. Now in that session, we also discussed several best practices.21:25Again, go back and rewatch that session recording if you have not already Highlighted that you want to use the Cisco provided BIOS configurations as well as the adapter configurations. And you can use shared policies versus individual policy.21:41Policies that's advised whenever possible. E.g., your domain profile, your port settings, VLAN settings, and vsans, you can clone those policies.22:01You create identical but separate policies and profiles, also where you can ensure your Vnic QoS value matches with your fabric QoS value. Now we do have a whole separate storage best practices for intersite.22:18I'm gonna paste that link in your chat as well. Take a quick look at that, announce any questions you have in our Slido or Webex chat. And with that being said.22:37We have had some frequent questions that have been asked about this, either during the last session or this was covered or since then, probably the most typical one was where can I find the predefined best practice policies?22:55And again, those are, those come recommended, so when you're going in and you're configuring those policies, you'll see the recommended policies there or you easily available for you to use. So another question is about re reducing friction in the environment.23:14When you're configuring and deploying profiles.23:34And of course you want to use source orgs as we covered earlier, you want to use templates, those two items are gonna be big, big wins to help you effortlessly manage your infrastructure.23:37Let's see. Now, another question we've had is kind of view pending changes and determine if a server reboot is required to apply a profile? We covered that in a couple of slides ago. It does come with that new feature functionality in our site managed mode now that you can go in and see.23:57Oh Pending changes, and are they waiting on a server reboot? If so, are they holding up, you know, application of the server profile changes that you intend to push out? Doing inter site managed mode?24:15Is called a profile status and it can give you reading such as not assigned. It could show ok not deployed. It could show validating or inconsistent. If you sit there and watch it, kind of.24:34It should update automatically in the console, but you might want to hit refresh once in a while if you get annoyed, you're not seeing the latest update. And see if the status changes there and.24:52The side by side comparison you can also see with both domain and chassis profiles another common question we've had is where do I add or update my VLANs?25:06Using inter site managed mode, so we know in inter site managed mode means that Intersight is managing your local fabric interconnects where your VLANs are often configured, it's not UCS manager anymore. Did we go into Intersight.25:22And what you want to do is find the domain profile controlling those fabric interconnects and go in and edit that domain profile, and you'll be able to see the VLAN and the vsans configured.25:41Within that domain profile. Another question we've had before to go through all these at once, is about the hardware requirements.25:57For inter site managed mode, that is another item I'm prepared I'll drop a link here in Webex chat. You should have that information available.26:14We got time left before the session's over, you'll be able to ask questions if needed. And with that being said, that's, that's all I had to cover here now. Apologies Raleigh if I took over all the questions.26:30And our next speaker, I believe is going to be Stephen. I'll let Stephen take over. Right, I got it. Okay, thank you very much Joe for that presentation and thank you for our attendance.26:45For the people that are still with us, thank you very much for and as well for joining. We're gonna talk a couple of or reviewing a couple of things that we already have in past presentations. 1st of all, we're covering a little bit about the IMN transition tool this in L after that we're.27:04We're gonna talk about new features and new capacities that have been introduced to intercite. So thank you if you are still seeing this.27:23And 1st of all, we're gonna talk about the transition tool and one of the things about Intersight and that is quite important to understand is this inter site represents a change in the way how we manage the infrastructure, right? So that's the.27:33Been very important to keep in mind. So in, in general terms we already know or you you may already heard that inter site is basically an alternative management stack for UCS manager, and actually for if you have UCS central as well and e.g. if in case you have interconnects with the attachment.27:54Or even rack servers or maybe a storage server like UCS as the 3260 or as well servers as rack servers operating as in standalone servers as well, alright so either managed mode basically allows you.28:15To do like to manage your infrastructure using the using policy driven configurations and operations and allowing you to have different domains basically on inter site management mode operating on inter site managed mode or in legacy mode alright? So.28:33Basically this comes to unify your management experience for all of your Cisco computer servers and and as well will help you to standardize the the software platform configuration using policies and profiles across interconnect or even.28:52The standalone base computers, right? And computer servers. So something to keep in mind as well when talking about inter site is the architecture because this is something that changed, you know, when cons when talking about legacy mode using UCS manager, the back in the day use something that we call.29:12Being a proper actually a proper proprietary database called UCS management information tree that basically models every piece of hardware that you that you have and as well the software configuration as a managed object. So back in the day this structure or or the, the management information tree that or the IMT.29:32The I MIT I'm sorry, as an internal database basically will have an instructor that is organizing something that we call an inverted three schema, starting from a object and as well using an XML based API. So basically all the operations are driven by.29:52XML payloads that are over set over using HTTP or HTTPS protocols. Rather using modern JSON that basically was introduced with the the new model or the new abstraction model that we are using for inter site managed mode.30:12All right, so that's something to keep in mind. But why would we we why did we move to redfish? All right, with the inter site managed model and basically Redfish is in the study models where the basically refers to this new architecture and the data structure, you know, the actual.30:29As defined by by the Redfridge organization. And this is basically an open an industry standard API for managing data centers. You may already have heard about this in the past, not only the data centers as well servers and networking equipment. All right? So.30:49Was previously created by the by the this management dashboards, the MTF and basically it came to replace all the protocols, e.g., like IMP IPMI with a modern more modern a more secure and a web friendly approach, you know, to help you to.31:10Managed in a, in a, in a more agnostic way, you know, all your data centers, alright so as an architecture use uses this RESTful API that basically will work as well, you know, the same way as XML, but it will work as well.31:30Or HTTP or HTTPS HTTP.31:50As using TLS protocol and instead of a specialized management commands, it basically it will use the universal web operations API calls like e.g. the get, the put and patch, the post, and and as well, this redfish based model relies on.31:53Several different core architectural pillars, you know, to create a more consistent and as I mentioned before, better agnostic management ecosystem. So this will help you not only to manage your own in UCS UCS server infrastructure as well will support different OEM vendors.32:13With different with a different approach compared with the past, with a better approach to manage firmware management and as well, you know, to support many different platforms as well, not only Cisco as well but as other platforms like Dell HP among others alright, and depending on the.32:33Platforms that are included on inter site as supported platforms, ok? Now.32:53Something that is important to keep in mind and actually this might be your next question is how do I start using IMN, alright or how do I migrate from UCS manager to an inter site managed mode environment, alright? And the ask the answer to that question is.33:00The inter site managed mode and basically inter site managed mode is, will help you, you know, to convert or migraine migrate your UCS manager or UCS central policies into IMM policies, inter site managed mode policies. And basically this is something that will help you not only.33:20As as as a transformer as well to migrate and push all these converted configuration to an inter site account and it's something that is free of cost because it doesn't require any additional license or or any additional payment, you know, to get access to this transition tool. This.33:40It's something that you can download from the from the from the Cisco official website and it is available for different platforms, e.g., different virtual platforms, being where hyper B for Microsoft or KBM as well, right? So why you're gonna use this as mentioned before because it's going to help you.34:00To make easier the transition from UCS manager and it will help you to automate the the basically the the the transition, you know, the, the conversion of all of these objects or all of these configuration that you have in your current UCS manager configuration into.34:20To an IMN configuration as well, right? So basically the different scenarios as well that we review that we talk about then during our last presentations basically is when you have when you want to transition from UCS manager or UCS Central into an inter site managed mode deployment.34:40Remember when having inter site, an inter site account, you know, to manage your UCS infrastructure.35:00Or your data center infrastructure, you can e.g. both domains, e.g., legacy mode and IMM, they can coexist, but at some point you need to keep in mind that you will be more interested in moving on inter site managed mode because you will have access to more features and as well because eventually.35:06It has been announced that the UCS manager eventually is going to be announced as an end of sale product and as well the M eight server generation servers are gonna be the last generation that is going to support UCS manager. So this is like the 1st one.35:26The 1st use cases when transitioning from UCS manager to IMM or as well when you have an already an inter site instance e.g. on on a SaaS account that you want to move to another account or you have a connected virtual appliance or even a private virtual appliance instance already installed in your in your.35:46Local instance and then you wanna move to another one using the transition tool. All right? So that's something that you can use and you can keep in mind.36:06You need e.g. additional help on how you can, e.g., install the virtual machines for all the considerations or or their requirements, you know, for installing the virtual machine and start this process, this migration process. Do not hesitate and contact your Cisco representatives so they can contact us contact put you in contact with the adoption team, the Cisco.36:17The customer success specialist will be more than helping to help you, you know, to during this process. All right? So about what's new on either side, that's something really important because every, every month practically the new features and new capacities or or corrections as well, you know, to the infrastructure.36:38That are introduced. So this is something that that I I like presenting to to our customers because you can see how the the platform is a dynamic platform that is adding new features and you, you will see new capabilities every practically every month. That's.36:57Something as well that I will share with you the link when you can see not only the the the features of the capacity that has been already introduced during the last months but as well the the new things that are coming during the next month as well. So, but to get us started I would like to e.g. show you the the privilege sets. This is so.37:17It's been very very.37:37Very important because normally when having e.g. role based access control, you would like to provide the, the, the right permissions for your, for your staffers, alright so in general intercept provides you like a system defined privileges, alright that you allows you to create, e.g..37:40User defined privilege privilege sets based, you know, one systems privileges for you know having a pre a more precise control over, you know, the, the user access. But with the custom privileges, you can provide more specific access to different users taking advantage of over 700.37:5950 privileges available on different categories that that's something that you can take advantage of. And the the main advantage is you will have a more fine, ingrained privileges for your customer providing the right access to the right infrastructure for for your for your staffers.38:19So as an example, you can allow like a network administrator to use server information for diagnosed that is not diagnostic.38:39Without e.g. granting configuration or management access. So or enabling e.g. a server administrator to view networking infrastructure details without permission or to modify or manage it. So this flexibility will help you to align your search user access with a specific, a specific tasks.38:49While enhancing security and and compliance, alright? So, this is something that is already available on on inter site as well and this one of the the next new features available is the the metric around alarm alarm rules. And back in the day when, when you.39:09Now e.g. an alarm rule, you will have the possibility just to create a rule or set a rule, you know, that.39:28We'll send you an email, a notification e.g. regarding the alarms generated on inter site infrastructure or on your UCS infrastructure, right? So in general terms, it will help you to define these specific conditions in terms of alarm rules, the specific conditions to trigger the alarms.39:37For metrics such as house energy, e.g., reception or transmission utilization, CRC errors, e.g., link failure errors and and they will help you, this will help you to enable a more proactive monitoring alright so and the basically in alarm rules, you will create the specific rules.39:57And within the rule you will set something that we call the threshold definition that basically this is tied to the individual metrics and they will define the, the thresholds, the specific threshold for a metric to basically activate and generate the, the alarm, right? And as well, you will have to select the device.40:17Where this alarm is going to apply. This is something very interesting because you can create an alarm that will be only specific for any specific for for a given set of devices or for a server specifically so it will be more, very helpful for for you to create this specific alarms and.40:38And generate e.g. the the the notification specifically for you. Another feature e.g. has to do with the netflow on inter site basically you already know what this will provide you real time visibility of the network, the network flows within the UCS domain alright?40:58This is something that you generate by policy. You will create a network a netflow policy and you can exporting the very detailed records, you know, for exporting to different analytic tools and netflow will will help you to enable proactive performance for monitoring.41:17Advanced security detection among other features alright so again this is something that can be enabled by policy model on inter site and you need to when creating the policy you will assign it to a server profile and this server profile needs to be deployed on a physical server just, just to be in place and start.41:37Working as as you as you wanted in monitoring the traffic that you want.41:57Right? Something additionally the customer hardware compatibility baseline. Well, this is very interesting because in general hardware compatibility list is something that was already introduced on inter site long ago. It will help you basically to identify what is the the If your current configuration, the, the server for.42:02Some internal components using a specific firmware versions are they are already proven or supporting on a specific operating system that you are installing. In general terms with.42:22The, the HCL baseline will help you to create a more custom customized our compatibility list for servers so you can define and manage your own standards, alright so you will be able to create baselines specific with a specific criteria depending on.42:36Model or even the server org other operating system that you're using and you can adapt information, you know, just to make sure that the compliance is being fulfilled on your server. So I will encourage you to start, you know, getting familiar with the hardware compatibility list because it will be.42:55Easier for you than going and consult different paper documentation or other tool tools out of inter site, you know, to.43:15Or your current configuration does support your operating system or even the vendor version that you are installing. So, highly recommended. Another thing is the local logical configuration backup, basically you you will be able to perform a configuration, I mean a backup.43:25In a configuration level containing all of the managed objects, you know, you can basically create a backup of the all the configuration that you have on inter site, you will be able to preserve identities and as well on I mean on e.g. ensuring that your server profiles identities are contained, you know, in the backup file that you're.43:44Creating. So to be a little a little more consistent during restoring operations and as well you will have the the capacity to visualize all the backup components in the infrastructure in the in the inter site platform and we you will have a capability to use find a.44:05Filtering capacities and you can e.g. you'll have the ability to set e.g. as protected different backup configurations that are being from being deleted, you know, from inter site which eventually will will hold up to 50 backup maximum. So the.44:25All the all this normally are deleted or removed by the platform by default, but you can protect your configuration or your backup configuration from being deleted by the system automatically. All right?44:44So I will hand over to Clark. My partner here, my colleague Alan Clark, so you can go with the the next part with the Splunk integration with Intersight.44:59Thank you Stephen. So the last set of webinar we did as part of the series is actually our Splunk integration with intersight. And what that is is for those of you who aren't familiar with Splunk, it's a great observability platform that really helps you see.45:14In great detail what's going on in your environment and kind of correlate issues across multiple different types of devices to kind of get a better picture of what's going on. Specifically with Intersight, what you're gonna get is a consolidated dashboard so you can get an end to end view for your network security events.45:31It, this is Splunk in general really. You get some net ops and troubleshooting. It interacts with various Cisco controllers, so not just intersight, but next dashboard or your ACI Apex.45:50A variety of other tools, they'll give you kind of that integrated experience. And then we've got Splunk base, which is Splunk's website which includes hundreds of plugins and add ons that actually can be added into your Splunk dashboard that automatically build some reports, dashboards, and integrations for you.46:05So the end of the day, what you get is full stack visibility, faster root cause analysis, data correlation across different parts of your infrastructure. And there's some built in AI to kind of assist you with with troubleshooting this and also with generating views that are.46:24In line with exactly what you're trying to see in your environment. For specifically with Intersight, we do Cisco publishes a Cisco Intersight add on force one. Our latest version is three two. It's our 3rd release this year in 2026.46:41This provides a kind of unified visibility for inventory for metrics and log analytics, some optimization of operations, really good for reducing mean time to resolution for incidents and issues.46:59There's some predictive analytics for early issue remediation, security compliance that's in there. We also added support for the newer servers so the unified edge is now supported with the add on. The GPU dent server is aC8 85 and C 08:45. Some new advanced dashboards for alarms and inventory and a pool monitoring.47:15And some more operational controls to really track, what's going on with you what your users are doing and the ability to kind of ad hoc data inputs actually pretty neat.47:34So this works for SAS, it works for CVA, it works for the PVA. One question that actually came up during that call was can we mix environments? The answer is actually, yeah, you can add multiple environments and they can be a mix of SaaS and.47:48CVA and PVA as long as they can all reach that Splunk instance. This will work as long as you have at least the essentials license advantages that required. It works for IMM, it works for intersite standalone mode. This will work with Splunk cloud. This will work with Splunk Enterprise if you're deployed on site, but this is a Cisco supported.48:02That app, so so we it is supported by Cisco. It's also certified, which means.48:22You know, it is meets all the requirements from the splunk side for having a certified supported app. And there's a link here at the bottom for exactly where to go download that app. We will drop that in the chat where we want but honestly with Splunk I think that the best way to look at this is actually if we can see it live and it looks like we got.48:29Get a little bit of time, so we're gonna go ahead real quick and I'm gonna show you what this looks like in Splunk. This is kind of the culmination of bringing everything together. All right, so this is our Splunk environment and you can see here, this is our Splunk enterprise.48:49We've got a couple apps installed, we do have our DC networking app. We've got some, some stuff the Splunk secure gateway. But yeah, today we're looking at this, the Cisco Intersight add on for splunks. We'll click on that. And the 1st thing you're gonna see here is actually our inter site accounts and we do have five of them added in here.49:07Some of these are SaaS, some of these are actually I think all of these are SaaS currently we don't have any virtual appliances, but we could add those in there as well. That's our configuration, but we're gonna go straight into our insights and I'm gonna go straight to our alarm insights, this is one of the really cool features is I've got five different inter site accounts here that are.49:26Our team runs from various locations, and they're separated for a couple of different reasons. But within Splunk I actually get an aggregate of all of those accounts, so I can see every alarm from every account that we're monitoring. This comes in especially important for my CVA or PVA customers where you may have.49:45Multiple virtual appliances for scale reasons, for regional reasons, but you can consolidate some of that view here in Splunk. So you can see here we've got a hundred 95 alarms across great. 306 have been cleared. Six that have actually increased in severity since the last time we looked at.50:01And these are gonna be things.50:21The disconnected targets, free's missing here. We've got a couple of of runtime issues physical storage on this probably something that actually needs to be looked at. These are the things that you're gonna see in the inter site insights. We can drill this down to, hey, show me just on one particular.50:23You know, account should be just this one domain on one account. I can even exclude servers that don't have a profile. So if I have servers that are installed I haven't deployed a profile on them yet, I can say hey exclude those. We don't want to see those right now.50:43We know they're not in use. So we actually if I drill down to this domain turns out this one's actually perfectly healthy. It's, that's a 1st for us. But you should see some alarms that show up here. Yeah, there we go. So Sticks alarms have been cleared on this one the last seven days.50:59One of the other really interesting things in one of that there we go. Now we're coming up. So we got 58 active alarms, we've got 89 clear alarms with this domain. We do need a lot of information in here and what's really great about this is you can actually get the.51:20The the demo license for Splunk install it on a windows VM or a Linux VM, connect this and for 60 days kind of play with I think it's 6030 or 60 days, actually just play with this to see what it looks like for your environment, and I really encourage people to do that.51:36The other thing we're gonna be seeing we can check our activity monitoring, and this is gonna show us, hey, what types of events are we having? What types of browsers are we having access with, right? What kind of where are activities coming from? Most of my people are based in the US so most of our activities are US based.51:52You can see most of our work here is modifying existing prof configs or creating new ones and just a whole ton of users in here working on these systems. We can see our like active users, our, our current concurrent activities, and we can see actually everybody's login time where they're logging from was really cool.52:09Oh, really interesting.52:29And it's also good for tracking, hey, are, where are people logging in from? You know, the other things I like to do in here, one of the inventory browser, I can pull a full inventory of everything we have across multiple UCS or multiple inter site instances at once, so I see, hey, we got.52:3050 rack servers and 54 blade servers. I can see how they're deployed. Most of ours are in IMM, we've got this one new unified edge box in here and then we've got, you know, some servers and standalone and we could actually break this down by which ones are in each individual inter site account. And then.52:50The lastly, and from me personally cause I do have attack background, the, the best part of this I think is the network troubleshooting. So, we can do domain based, we can do server based, we can do chassis based.53:10We'll start with the domain based, and what this is gonna do is gonna tell me, hey, what kind of transmissions, what kind of traffic have I had in the last 24 h? Yeah, we've got our accounts in there, it's gonna continue loading.53:26But the, the most important thing here for me, from a troubleshooting perspective, we scroll all the way down here at the bottom, is this error counter, which we actually are are good for the last 24 h, but let me let me fix this.53:41That's not always true in our environment. Yeah, there we go. So we can see we actually have a couple of links here that have CRC problems, but it's a very low amount. So we got 25 on uplink one two and we got ten on uplink one one, on our BFI in this domain.53:58So that's actually not gonna be enough errors to ever throw an issue or take a link down. But what it will do is occasionally cause some like intermittent performance issues and for those of you who are on the ops side or everybody on the the troubleshooting side.54:20Probably the worst thing you can ever try and track down is, oh, the app runs slow some of the time and we don't know why. Stuff like this in Splunk where we will get, you know, it's monitoring every port across all the domains and all the environments and it's gonna show me which ones are having which type of errors, even if there's a low rate.54:34We can see, hey, I actually have these errors here. I click on this, I can actually get a more detailed view of when these errors happened, right? So here we go. This was on 9 July. For whatever reason, we had a burst of CRC errors on the 9th.54:54Happened and it went away. It's not enough to triple alarms enough to take down a link, but it is enough to cause an impact to an application. We could get a good point and the old way of troubleshooting this is I gotta go figure out the path that the packets will be taking for this. I gotta go map all this out and gotta go manually check the interfaces across my network.55:11With the Splunk integration, I just come in here and look at the dashboard and go, oh, I had CRCs, the time correlates with when you saw an issue. We can start we're starting from a known point versus starting from, well, it's somewhere in the network. This is one of the strongest features but what I really like.55:29Personally I've used this for troubleshooting live issues in real environments before. So I think this feature, this type of integration is really worthwhile, and I think it really shows the power of the integration with the multiple products here. So.55:47That is my very brief Splunk demo with the Plunk integration intersite. I'm gonna stop sharing and Riley, I'll hand it back to you to kind of take us on. Awesome. Thanks so much Alan, for that informative press.56:02Presentation and demo.56:22Go ahead and share my screen here. Bear with me.56:28Awesome. So now we can open it up to some live Q and A and some additional resources here. Couple of questions we have in here for our experts. We can go ahead and answer these live. Our 1st one.56:51What hypervisors can I deploy a virtual appliance on? I'll take that one. So it does depend a little bit on what type of deployment you're using. So if you're doing a multi node, which means you you're doing clustered for a large scale or you're using the metrics nodes.57:08It's gonna be vSphere, AHB or KVM. If you're just doing a single node virtual appliance, you know, that that's the scale that works for you. You can actually you can also add in hyper V for that, that particular deployment type.57:28Okay, that makes sense, thanks Alan. Couple more here. Is there somewhere I can find predefined best practices or policies? Yeah, I can speak to that Raleigh.57:45So for inter site managed mode, you'll you'll see those when you go and create those policies, you'll see the predefined ones and be able to easily select those there for, e.g., I think as we said, the BIOS and, and the adapters are gonna have.58:01Those predefined policies there. Awesome. Thanks Joe. A couple more here. How can I reduce friction in my environment when I'm configuring and deploying my profiles?58:18Yeah, I I'll be glad to speak to that too. I'll say for the attendees when you're using inter site managed mode, a couple of things you wanna do is make sure that you're using organization source orgs, as Alan said in his.58:34Presentation is kind of a flat structure there, but as I covered in one of my slides, you can have a source organization and then a consumer org, one place where you can hold all your policies there. And you also want to use templates as a second.58:49Item to do is once you get kind of a golden config, make a template out of it and then clone it in order to deploy those settings. Awesome. Kind of a follow up question here. Can I view pending changes and determine if a server reboot is required to apply.59:04Yeah, you'll be able to do that. You'll have a new screen they recently added or new part of a screen called profile status as part of that. And you can even have kind of a side by side when you're creating those policies there.59:27But that's where you'll go to look at it in inter site managed mode. Awesome. Another follow up, where can I add or update my VLANs in IMM? So.59:42For that where you might use to go to UCS manager for those configurations. When you change and you start using intersite managed mode instead, what you'll do is, is go into the actual profile for the domain.59:58That replaced UTS manager, now you're dealing with a domain profile, and when you go in and when you have rights, you can edit that domain profile and that's where you'll go in and configure the VLANs and vsans for your fabric interconnects. Awesome. Just a couple more here for you.01:00:15Where can I find the hardware and firmware requirements for IMM? That was a link I posted in chat earlier. I think it's available too if you're using Slido.01:00:35You click on the hamburger button there, you should see some of the hardware. I can repost that link there in chat. Give me just a second and that should take care of it. No problem. While we're doing that, we have one final question here that is, can I add multiple interstate virtual accounts to one Splunk deployment?01:00:53Yeah yes you can so you can have you know assuming your your Splunk, your Splunk enterprise or your your scale of properly take the ingests, yeah. You can add as many, I don't want to say as many as you want, but as many as kind of reasonable. I'll.01:01:14I would have to go find the exact limit, but I've seen at least ten before added this customer because if they had regional cvas and then all of those tied into one Splunk instance, so yeah, you can have multiples. The one thing I would.01:01:34Kinda advise on that though, if you're doing multiple trying to set all your API keys for that to expire at the same time. So you only have to go in and do that, that API key refresh for auth on a general cycle for everything at once and you're not having to go in every other week and and fix.01:01:52Awesome yep that totally makes sense. Thanks for the clarification there, Alan. Looks like that is the last of our Q and A So we'll wrap up with a couple of slides on Cisco IQ. Cisco IQ is gonna provide a complete landscape clarity along with proactive resilience, rapid resolution, and contextual.01:02:10Contextualized professional services.01:02:30So you can see it is very easy to onboard and just four steps here starting with login using your cco. We're gonna name the account and select what we want to migrate. We're going to create the account and migrate the data and then migration is complete.01:02:35And we have a onboard slide here for new Cisco IQ customers that has even less steps. So 1st of all, we're going to create a new Cisco IQ account, with our existing CCO.01:02:53We're gonna create a name and select our primary storage and then follow the self guided account configuration wizard. But definitely something to check out very easy to onboard. So before we go, if you need any help onboarding, feel free to submit a survey or email.01:03:08I will drop the link in the chat here as it appears it's a bit hard to see in this view.01:03:28And that concludes our session today. Thanks everybody so much for joining and big thank you to our experts for all the assistance. This was the compute EIS recap and live Q and A session. Thanks again.01:03:35