Optimizing Traditional Enterprise Workloads with Cisco UCS

Okay, I hope you're able to see my screen and hear and see me clearly.00:10Yes. Okay, we can. Once again, thank you everyone for joining today's expert insight series on optimizing traditional enterprise workloads with Cisco UCS. I am Pratibha. I currently work as a customer success specialist.00:16In the data center technology of Cisco, I have more than a decade of experience spanning across application networking, enterprise switching, and data center technologies. I've been a part of TAC, professional services, and now I'm currently part of the customer success team.00:35Along with me here today, we have my colleague Ronak. He is also a customer success specialist in the data center technology with more than four years of experience in Cisco and he loves to work on AI, automation and DevOps solutions. So welcome once in.00:54This session is the 1st of a three part series. This is the 1st of the three sessions. The next session is scheduled for next Thursday, same time and that will cover UCS from core to edge, including UCSX series servers and.01:15Unified edge. And the last session will be a quick recap and live Q and A where we will do a recap of the entire series and also give you an opportunity to unmute yourself and ask questions live. But for today.01:35Kindly use the Q and A panel on Webex to post your questions if you have any and we will take them up throughout the series, throughout the session and in case we're not able to address something today, we'll definitely get back to you with them over a mail after.01:54The session. Apart from this, of course, so you do see the QR code on the screen. So if you would like to register for the upcoming sessions as well, please do scan the QR code and register. Alternately, we'll also share the link from where you can see the schedule.02:14For all the upcoming expert insights series sessions and you can register from that link as well.02:34Now, apart from this throughout the course of this session, we will also have some questions for you on Slido. This is to make the session interactive, but also to understand your environment better so that we could support you in your UCS adoption journey.02:41So based on the feedback that we received, we'll customize probably some parts of this session and the subsequent sessions as well to make it most beneficial for you. So please take a moment scan the QR code and log in to Slido. Alternately, you can go to slido.com.03:00And type in the Slido number that you see there. The passcode is UCS.03:20I'll flash the slide for another maybe ten to 15 s. Please do join in. This is how we can hear from you and understand you, your environment and your requirements better. So please do actively participate in the Slido.03:27Okay. Now let me flash the 1st question also just to get a little bit of understanding of where are you from? Where are you all joining us from today? And also to check that Slido is working fine for all of you, if there are any issues, let us know, ok? I see some responses. Bangalore.03:48Jakarta, Australia, Delhi, Mumbai.04:08Okay, a lot of bangalore, Noida, Indonesia, Chennai, Korea, ok, I see 16 folks actively responding for the others as well. Please do log in and give us your response.04:14Just so we know that your slide is also working fine. Okay, so we've got a good mix of participation from across APJC, which is interesting. I see Korea, India, Australia, Jakarta, so that's nice.04:32We'll have more such questions along the way, stay tuned for them. Now, this specific session is divided into three parts. The 1st one, as you can see is explore with us. So this will just be a few slides to walk you through some of the fundamentals.04:48Of UCS and also to cover the power of inter site policy based management. 2nd part will be live demos, which is show me how. So we will do a live demo. Runak will be our demo specialist for today. So he will give you a demo on policy based management in action.05:07And life cycle management and automation. And the last part of this session would be how can we help you succeed? So if there are any questions that you've still not answered, we'll take that time to answer some of your questions. We'll also do a quick recap of the session, some key points for you.05:27To remember, what are some of the next steps that you can take and towards the end of the webinar when you leave the webinar, you'll also get a survey to tell us if you would like us to schedule a one on one consultation with you to answer some of your questions, you know, to help.05:47Review in your adoption journey or if there's any other specific feedback for future sessions that will benefit you, please do take that survey and let us know. Each of your feedback on the survey is reviewed and we design our sessions accordingly.06:07So with that being said, before we go into the 1st section, which is explore with us, the key concepts, we have one question for you. What are you currently using to manage your UCS?06:25Do you use the UCS manager to manage policies for your compute nodes or do you use intersite? Okay, we see a 5050, ok, more of inter site. Let's see ok 7580 percent of inter site that is nice, ok, 65.06:41Seven, ok, come back to a 5050. Interesting.07:01So I see eight responses overall, please do take some time to share your responses. Okay, so it's almost equal, but maybe inter site now shows about 55 percentage. Okay, that is interesting. Thanks for this.07:07In one of our future sessions, we'll also be covering how to move from UCS managed mode to inter site managed mode. So please do keep an eye on the expert inside three schedule and register for them. We'll guide you and we'll help you in your movement to inter site managed. But it's good to know that a majority.07:25Are already using inter site managed mode.07:44Okay, so now let's move to the 1st part of this session which should be explored with us. Let's now look at what is Cisco Unified Computing System? The diagram, let's start with the diagram on the right. So this diagram tells you.07:47What is that fundamental reason why UCS changed the data center design or revolutionize the data center design? Now as you can see, the 1st point is complete server infrastructure.08:07So there were a lot of components in the data center. E.g., your LAN is one local area network, a SAN, your storage area network, you know, your management system and your compute servers. So all of these were operating in silos, but with UCS unified computing system.08:21You can see that all of these components are unified into one server, complete server infrastructure. Now if you see what is there on the right, so you have fiber channel, you have ethernet, you have management. So all of this converge into a pair of fabric interconnect.08:42And this is what we call as a unified fabric. So by connecting all your input and your output lines to this fabric, we are eliminating, you know, the massive web of cables that you would see behind your racks before. So at this point of time, we connect all of this top.09:01Fabric interconnect that you see on the right side of the screen.09:21Now, we also call this fabric centric connectivity and one more thing to note is that your single point of management would be your fabric, interconnect. So you do not need a separate management server to manage your fleet of equis.09:25Or your fleet of servers, you just use it, use fabric interconnect and inter site, we'll come to what inter site is, but you use that to manage. And this is also highly available, right? So you can see an FI two fis exist, a pair of fis, so they make a UCS domain and we also get.09:45High availability.10:05Now, apart from all of these, of course we spoke about complete server infrastructure, fabric centric connectivity, you know, reducing for server cabling decisions, so all of this is one part of it, but what really changed the game was this completely stateless servers.10:07So which means before this concept, the identity of every server was tied to the hardware. But now what happens is this identity is abstracted into something that is called as service profiles. Of course, if you're using UCS manager, we call it service profiles. If you're using.10:25The side we call them as server profiles. So the abstraction happens in these profiles. So let's say you have.10:45Your UUID, your IP, your Mac addresses pools, so all of that, all of these policies is defined into what we call as a template. We'll come to that a little later, but from there you derive a profile and you attach this profile to a server.10:53So let's say at any point of time a server fails, you have to replace the hardware. All you have to do is unassociated and then attach it to your new server and you're good to go. So your identity is not bound to a piece of hardware, but your identity is based on the server profiles that we just spoke about.11:10It makes again because it's you're defining all the policies and software, it makes the system hundred percent programmable and finally because of this you can also integrate it with the partner solutions that you see on the right VMware, Red Hat Nutanix or if you have.11:31Bare metal servers. So this is the overview of inter site sorry overview of UCS and you know why does UCS play a very important role in unifying management, ethernet, storage, and the compute?11:50Notes together. Now with this being said, let's go to Cisco use case overview. So now for the majority majority of you who said that you use inter site to manage your UCS infrastructure, you're probably aware of this already. So if you see the 1st diagram, intersite can help.12:08If you manage UCS servers regardless of their location. So whether you have servers in some remote edge location or it's there on your core.12:28You can manage them every manage all of them from a single console, which is your inter site. Now the last point that you see here is in terms of the workloads. So whether your workload is a bare metal workload, is it a virtual workload on a hypervisor environment like vCenter or is it a containerized workload? So regardle.12:38Of where your workload is running, you can manage the policies consistently across sites. And the 3rd one, which is the center.12:58You know tile that you see here is you can use inter site to implement the solution for your entire server stack based on best practices and validated designs to design, implement, and also manage your stack. So imagine if we had our operation.13:08Team who had to log into each of these servers individually and configure one by one. So that would be having a lot of overload. But here in this case, this is a unified operation framework, so with one place for the entire stack, you could push the configuration, you can manage your policies, and also regardless of where you're.13:28Servers are present where which form of workloads do you have? You can do all of this from one place.13:48Now, ok, we've spoken a little bit about UCS. What is this unified computing system? We've spoken a little bit about how can you have a single console to manage policies across your solution stack based on best practices validated designs and all of that. Now let's look at what is the inter site.13:57Policy model actually look like. So the configuration for any server is divided into three sets of policies as you can see on the screen. The 1st one is chassis, second one is domain, which is for your fabric interconnect and the 3rd one is your server policies, which means which is specific to your compute nodes.14:15So the 1st one that you see on the left, chassis policy, so you can see.14:35Policy is related to your IMC, your power policies, SNMP terminals, anything related to your chassis gets covered there. 2nd one that you see is domain policy, so this is policies related to your fabric interconnects, so your VLAN policy VSAN policy, for your storage and.14:40Port policy, network control policy, so all of this is covered in the domain policy. And the 3rd one is your server policies, which means for your compute node, what settings and behavior do you want it to have? So you have BIOS policy, boot policy, VKVM policy, storage policies, and so on.15:01Again this is just a small list to get to give you the big picture. But of course there are so many more policies which of course Ronak will walk you through in the demo when he's creating a template and adding the policies to it. Some of these policies might be mandatory, some of these optional if it's needed for your environment, you can go ahead and configure them.15:20And as we'll discuss in the next slide as well. So usually you combine the policies as step one as you can see over here in compose, you combine the policies into a server profile template. And then from that template, you derive multiple server profiles. Let's say you have hundreds of servers.15:40You don't want to go ahead and manually configure for each of your server, right? So you put all your policies into a template from the template you derive profiles and then you associate each of the profiles to your UCS servers and domain. And finally.16:01You can track their hardware compliance, you can update your firmware from inter site, you can configure policies accordingly, you can track drift in configuration, so all of that comes as part of your operate phase. So this is what the policy model of intersight looks like.16:16And just going a little bit deeper into policy based management features. So the 1st one as you were talking about complaints checking and drift detection. So which means you can continuously compare your deployed servers with the intent that you have defined in your policies. And if there's.16:37Any drift or divergence inter site flags it out. E.g., let's say you were troubleshooting and at the time of troubleshooting, you changed a BIOS setting, but you forgot to restore it to what is defined in the policy, then inter site would flag that out.16:572nd thing is multi domain and multi cluster fabric policies. So if you're using UCS manager, right? So UCS manager, it's basically something that is on your FI. So FI, so per UCS domain, you will connect to the corresponding UCS manager and you will push your configuration from here. But here if you use intersite.17:14You can have a standard set of policies across domains rather than having to go to each domain and then manually configure it.17:34There. The 3rd one that you see is pools for abstracted resource allocation. Now what this means is, again, for those of you who already used templates and profiles to deploy to your servers, as part of your profiles or even the template, right? You will have multiple pools. Let's say you can have an IP pool, a Mac pool, a UUID pool.17:43And you give the phone of addresses there. And then when you associate the profile to a server, one address from that port gets automatically assigned. You don't have to go and manually assign it. So you can avoid having duplicate, you know, IP or Mac or UUID addresses instead of clearly.18:03You know, maybe noting down of which is assigned to what and avoiding duplicate or conflicts, it is done automatically from a pool.18:23And the last one statelessness, which of course we spoke about the templates. We'll also talk about it briefly in the next slide and automated firmware. So you can check your hardware against the HCL or hardware compatibility list and if there's any firmware upgrades that you have to do, you can define it in a policy and then you can push it from.18:30Intercite. So you don't have to do a firmware update, you know, one by one going to each of the servers and logging in. You can do all of that from one place.18:50Okay, so now we'll just take a quick moment to look at the policy for consistent configuration. Again, we were talking about this time and again, so you define different policy, again domain related to the domain related to the chassis related to the server etc. You put all of those policies in what we call as a template.19:03So your standards are defined in the template and through this template you derive multiple profiles. So.19:23One server can be associated to a single profile, so if you have hundreds of servers, you can automatically use this template to derive hundreds of profiles and then associate it to the server. So you can ensure consistency and standards in how in the way you configure and you can avoid misconfiguration.19:30Instead if you were to configure each of your servers from scratch, then there's more scope for, you know, misconfiguration or not complying with your standard configuration.19:50Now before we go to the demo, one last slide that we have is to see the policy based management in action. So usually, you know, the only complexity that we keep hearing again and again is, we have a lot of servers. It's difficult to you know tweak configuration or to.20:02To, you know, to manage them manually. So if you look at your virtualization now through inter site policies is just one bit of it that we spoke about, but we also have a hypervisor integration. So for all of you who have vCenter, let's say e.g., and you could just claim your V.20:21Center on inter site and then you will start seeing a virtualization tab with your ESXi host, you know, capacity CPU and so on Vmiss that are there on your ESXi host. So you'll start seeing all of this on intercite. So you can use you know you can use insights that are available.20:42Available there to scale your virtual infrastructure up or down accordingly based on your requirements.21:01Of course, automated VM provisioning, so there are multiple workflows that are available on inter site. Ronak will walk you through some of them. There are also workflows that you can use to automate the provisioning of Vmiss through inter site. 2nd one, if you look at databases, you know, what is really important.21:09Is you need to have high performance optimization and you also need to have configuration consistency because you don't want data corruption. These are databases, right? So you don't want data corruption or bottlenecks in performance. So these are the two things that are usually critical when it comes to databases. Now through IMM policy.21:29Is you can set specific caching rules or you know low latency policies and then you can associate it that to the servers to ensure performance and.21:48Automated patching. So that is also possible through intercite. Last one for if you look at enterprise applications, you know, the goal is accelerated time to market, market, right? So now when you have the physical infrastructure translated into flexible software defined infra, which means.21:59Everything is defined in your policies, so your application deployment time also quickens and in case, you know, a hardware fails, then like like we discussed before, all you have to do issociate the profile from that server, you know, replace the hardware associated with your new server. So you can.22:19Also have policy driven compliance, end to end life cycle management, all of that taken care of by inter site or your enterprise apps. So regardless of whether you have a virtualization environment with hypervisors or you have databases or, you know, you have servers that are cater to your enterprise apps through intercite.22:39And through policy based management and the workflows, the workflows many of workflows come by default, so you can.22:59You know, optimize your environment using inter site. Just before we go to demo, I have one quick question for you. I know I kept mentioning workflows here and there, but I specifically use the term workflows just to understand do you use inter site workflows?23:08Is to provision your servers, install OS or maybe any other.23:28Workflows or tasks that you use. Please take a moment to answer this slider question. Yes I use workflows, NO I don't use or if you say I'm not aware of workflows or inter site, NO problem at all. Ronak is here to address just that. So he'll tell you what workflows on inter site aren't.23:33Magic behind that so that you can go back and explore workflows in your environment.23:53Okay, that's interesting. So workflows is something that's really, a critical piece that's available on inter site I see only 7 % say yes to that, which is surprising. Six person now. Maybe for those 6 % you can use the chat to tell us what which of the workflow.23:58Workflows do you actually use in your environment? Do you have a custom workflow or do you use one of the pre designed workflows that are already available on inter site? Use it on the chat to tell us that. But with that being said, I see the major, a majority of you say I'm not aware of workflows on inter site so.24:18I'll pass it on to Ronak to show us how to use inter site, you know, how to use policies to make our work easier and also to show you some of the workflows. Over to you Ronak.24:38Thank you very much for such a wonderful presentation. Now, let me quickly move on to the demonstration. Now this demonstration will be a little different in which we will try to cover a lot of things in any place. If you have any questions, please feel free to put them in the chat and we will move.24:54More than happy to answer those. If you also want to ask any questions live, you can raise your hand and we can take that up as well. Now, this is what inter site looks like.25:13Currently. It might seem a little different from than inter site on your end. That is because we have integrated our inter site with cloud control the flagship product that Cisco is coming up with that has all the AI features. Now this is a tech preview so we have early access to it. If time permits, maybe we can go.25:24Into a little bit of use cases what you can expect when you integrate cloud control with intercite. But before that, if, ok, let us move on to the demonstration of this session. I will try to cover as much as I can.25:43Any place you have any questions, please feel free to ask. Now I'll start with probably the workflows as I, as we saw that there are few people who are interested to know more about workflows. So the workflow option will be visible to you on the, under the automate tab.26:02In inter site, when you go onto the left hand side, you will have an automate section. Once you go inside that, you will have workflows. Now workflows are nothing but a chain of tasks that gets executed based on some conditions and based on some inputs that you give to the workflows. Now, I'll explain that how.26:18How it works, but before that, let me talk about the building blocks of a workflow. The 1st and the smallest building block of a workflow is a task. Task is a single.26:38Execution or so if I give you an example, so if you just want to set up a one time boot order, so that is a task. Any function that you just want to do as a singular thing.26:48On any use case that you just want to do singlely, then we will be having this task. Okay I see your question that the demo should be on intersite and not cloud control yes, we will focus only on inter site in the majority of the demo.27:04At least 90 % of the demo will only include inter site and we will not touch upon cloud control. If time permits, we'll go to cloud control. This automate workflow is available to you on inter site itself. It does not require you to integrate with cloud control. I hope that answers the question.27:22So there are so many tasks. In all these you have system tasks, so these are tasks that are given to you from cisco's side itself. There are 200 storage related tasks, virtualization related tasks, there are 70 of them, 50 of them are network related. You can filter them according to your needs and.27:38Each task can be performed to do a particular thing. So all these are already provided to you.27:57But on top of that, you can also create your own task. So what do you need to do for that? You click on create task, you can either create it in the designer mode, which I really prefer. It gives you that drag and drop drop kind of option. If I'll just go to this, I'll just give it name. Maybe I'll just go to designer. Yeah. So these.28:03Is your canvas, which you will use to design your task. Now what are the components that you can use to design your task? There could be components like you want to invoke Ansible playbook, you can invoke a PowerShell script, you can invoke SSH commands or you can also invoke some.28:23Web API request and created own task. So this will act like a workflow. E.g., if I just want to invoke, webin web API request, just maybe I just want to check what is the weather.28:43So I will just give the inputs that it requires. What is the URL that I want to map to it? If I require any headers, all those information we'll give, and then we will have the outputs. Now, how do we use the outputs that is based on us?29:00We can use the output according to our need. So these will be some tasks that you can use or you can start onboarding. If I just remove this, you can also use Ansible in case you are using Ansible in your environment, you can use it as a task in your.29:16Task when you're creating it as well. I'll just stop this and I'll go to some system defined tasks and give you some examples. So all these options, if I'll just expand it, so all these if you want to create a new.29:33Storage volume if you want to deploy or install operating system, all these are part of some task or another. So these are the building blocks for a workflow. Now these tasks will come together and go one after the another.29:48Maybe you can have some conditions in between as well and those will create the workflow. Now apart from tasks, we also have data types. Now data types are nothing but the inputs that you give to the tasks, so you can define your own kind of data type or you can use some system defined data types as well. So these data types could be different.30:05Constructs that are used in inter site, it could be VLANs, it could be the different IP.30:24Ranges Mac addresses, all those could be the different data types that you have. You can also create your own if you feel so. Okay, Mouse is lagging a little. Okay, now we also have environment variables in case.30:30If you want to use environment variables for your workflow, that is also supported. And one very important thing that got added recently is schedules. You can also have schedules defined in which you want to schedule your workflow.30:49And run it at a particular time. Now, all these are the building blocks. Now we come to the main thing that is the workflow. Now these workflows, if I just open one of them, e.g., boot server from ISO URL, so all these you see are tasks themselves. So all these tasks.31:03Come together and make a workflow. So this is to boot a server from a ISO URL, so if you have a ISO that is present on a URL and you want to boot a particular server using the that ISO as the OS, you can do that. So.31:22But we'll see how does that happen. So if we go to the general tab, we get to see the inputs, the variables and the outputs. In inputs, we need to select the server which server do we want to use. We also want to select the target device. So that is that. We also need to give the ISO URL.31:38Of course, which ISO you want to use. The protocol type is it HTTP, is it FTP or accordingly you can give and also ok I'll come to that question as well. Serial number, of course, to the serial number of the server.31:58Now there is a question that are there system defined tasks? Of course, there, as I was talking about, there are around 400 system defined tasks available to you and all these tasks are categorized in different sections. You can use any of them. All of them are available to you on your inter site account itself.32:15So these tasks you can take advantage of and create your workflows if you need custom workflows. If not, you also have system defined workflows. So there are, if I just go to sample workflows.32:34Okay, and just expand it. Yeah. So there are at least over hundred workflows that you can run on your system and all these are provided to you from Cisco itself. So all these workflows are different workflows that you can take advantage of.32:52You can mount your hypervisor data store, you can, ok, hyperflex maybe you might be using still, but in case you're using you can do a lot of things on hyperflex, you can add data from workspace onto inter site and all those.33:12Is the workflow feature available on virtual appliance? Yes, it is also available on virtual appliance and it's not just a SaaS thing. But of course, if you are using a private virtual appliance, some of the workflows that require access to the outside world, those might not work the best way.33:29But apart from that, all the workflows are supported in both appliance and inter site SaaS. Okay, so I hope this was a brief introduction to the workflows itself. Now I will go to the demo of today. What we will do in this demo is to provision a server. Now.33:44Provisioning a server is also a workflow which we can see here. Maybe I'll just search it.34:04Provision, yeah, provisioning a bare metal server. Now this is a very common use case that we see in a lot of customer environment because you have so many servers and you get sometimes new servers into your environment. Provisioning them becomes a very big task. What configurations do you need to give to them?34:12How do you ensure that the server that I got today has the same or similar configuration to the server that I.34:30Have from one year or two years back in the time. We don't want to have configuration drift. Maybe we configure a server six months back that was configured by someone else. Now we are configuring another server by someone else. So there are huge chances that there would be some kind of configuration drift. There could be some errors that might occur. So to.34:38Mitigate that and to ensure that we have consistent configuration across servers.34:58We use workflows. Now these workflows will have its own requirements. So as I was talking about, there are inputs that we need to feed into the workflow. And what are those inputs for these, for this workflow that is the server? You need to select which server you want to go ahead with.35:04You need to select a service server profile template.35:24Now pretty also talked about the server profile template. Server profile template is a golden image of configuration. It has a lot of policies that are integrated inside it and that acts as a golden image. From that template, you can.35:28Provision a lot of different servers by deriving profiles out of them. You can define one particular template for your environment and for all the similar servers. E.g., you have 50 virtualization servers and you want to have similar configurations in all of them. So you define one template for.35:46All the virtualization servers and then derive 50 profiles out of it and just assign those profiles to the servers and all the configurations will be done.36:05For all the 50 servers in one go and they will ensure that it will have consistent configuration, ok? Now we will have these inputs, you need to set the server, you need to give the name of the profile in case you want to give that. We'll come to that a little later.36:14You also need to select the OS image that you want to use and installation mode and SU image. Now we'll come to this a little later when we'll go through it.36:34But one key thing that you see here that is to define the server profile template. Now let us move on to that part where we will see how do you define a server profile template. Now to define any template or profile, you need to come to the configured tab.36:43This configure tab would be on the left hand side of your inter site screen. You will have profiles, policies, pools, all these under this. Now to create a template, you need to come to the template section. You can also create profiles from here. You can create your policy.37:01Create pools from here. Now, when we talk about template, the building block for any particular template is pools and policies. Okay, I don't know why we got some network issue, I'll disclose all of these.37:18Okay, so the building blocks are pools and policies for our profile or our template. We will need some pools that we will also be creating when we go through them. We'll also need policies as we were talking about tasks and workflows for.37:36Automating or orchestrating a lot of different things on inter site, we have policies. Now the policies have a set of configuration. A particular set of configuration is part of one particular policy, so there could be policies for firmware, there could be policies for network, there could be policies for boot order, there could be policy for BIOS.37:53So that particular configuration is only part of that particular policy.38:13So we have policies, we have profiles. Each profile gets mapped to one particular server. So profiles and servers have that one to one mapping, and today we will see how to create a template. Now in templates also you have different options. You have chassis profile template, you have unified edge, which is a new thing that Cisco has come up with.38:19So you have profiles templates for that, you have profile template for a UCS domain in case you are having an IMM.38:39Based infrastructure where the fis are being managed by inter site itself. You can have a UCS domain profile template as well. Now there are templates and VHP templates as well. Today we will see how to create a UCS server profile template, so we will select that.38:46Now, we can use organization to segregate the different resources on your inter site account. If you want to have segregation between the servers, segregation between the endpoints, you can segregate them by organization. This will help you in more of role based access control.39:03In inter site, but you can use default in case you don't want to segregate it. Now we'll just give it a name, maybe yeah s service profile template, something like this, then we will need to select whether.39:22It is a UCS server that is standalone, whether it is statically connected to the top of the rack switch or is it connected to.39:42And FI. So in our case, the server is connected to FI so we'll select that and we will also have an option to select for unified edge. If in case you want to do it for a unified edge system and you want to deploy template for that, you can do that as well. You also have tags. Now tags in inter site is another.39:50Option for you to have more of searching capability in which you can have a key value pair, you can have your own tags as key and you can set up a value. When you search by this key value pair on the search option in inter site, you can just get all the.40:11Resources that have the same key value pair. So for that we have tags, you can also give description if you want. Now we'll go to the next option. Now this entire UCS server profile template is segregated in different sections. We have compute configuration where management storage and network.40:31Now in each we have different options. Now, for UUID, this is a unique identifier for any resource on inter site, we can select the pool for it. We can either select a pool that is already created or we can create a pool. So we'll just create a pool for today. Yes.40:48Okay and again you can give a tag or description according to your use case.41:17Now in your environment, you will have your own UUIDs that you will be using. You would need to define a prefix for it and you will have which block you're starting from and till what size do you want it to be. So prefix for today's example I'll just give.41:26Value of zeros and maybe zeros here as well. And maybe I'll just have a hundred or a hundred block of UUIDs. So this pool will be used by hundred different resources.41:47And there is a limit of zero to 1024. This UUIDs will be used by them. Similarly, you can add more blocks if you want, if you want to have maybe one more block of maybe 20000, and you can again give one more size of how big.42:02Of that block do you need. So all these blocks can be defined and then you just need to create it. So once it is created, you can see that it is already assigned this pool. Similarly, we also can define BIOS policies. Now BIOS policy is quite a detailed configuration.42:22I'll show you how it looks like if we just do this and again we can give it tag or description. Now this one, whether we want it to be a generic one or a model specific one that we can assign here. Now as we are doing.42:41Get for an Fi connected server. So this generic will be used for any B series C series or X series servers, so we will just let be that as the option that is to be selected. Now, whether we want to use Cisco predefined configuration, we have option for that as well. This.43:01Reduces a lot of your work. Now, once we have the different details of the UCS server that we want to use, so we need to give the generation in our case that is M six.43:19And the CPU type is it AMD or Intel and we provide that in our case it is Intel. And now it is very interesting here. So what kind of workload do you want to use here? Whether you want to use a virtualization environment, whether do you want to use data analytics on it, whether it is going to be a high performance computing HBC.43:34So all these you can select here. According to your workload, it will be.43:54Assigned to that. E.g., if we just use high performance computer and we go to next, we see all the configurations will be redefined for this particular workload. Okay, stuck for a few seconds. Okay.44:00Now this.44:20Lot of options here. So in advanced you have, ok, it's a little slow for some reason.44:22Okay, what I'll do I'll just view it so that we can see how it looks like.44:42Yeah, so in the BIOS options, you have so many different options that you can configure on your own. But we will leave it to platform default and that is the best practice to leave it to platform default because we have done a lot of research and gave you these configurations. But in case you want to change any of them.44:50And you can do it that way as well. But for our use case, we'll just keep it to platform default, you can see there are so many different options where you can configure all of your NVMe options, your CPU configurations, GPU configurations, and what, how do you take most advantage of your hardware, of your memory.45:08Of your CPU, all those configurations can be done through this BIOS configurations. So all these are already defined. We will recommend just to keep it to default for your use case.45:28And that should work fine. Again, if you want to change it later, you can do it. And in the next reboot, when you reboot the server, the biased configurations will be applied to your server. Then we come to boot order. Now, in what order do you want the boot to function, you can select that.45:38Okay, We'll this. Now in this case, do you want to use UEFI or legacy that you can select here? In case you want to go ahead with legacy, you need to add a boot device as well.45:58So in case you just want to use, maybe a virtual media, you can define the name of the virtual media, and you can give a type.46:17In case you just want to give a particular type of virtual media, e.g., if you want to give KVM app DVD, we can create that and then we can click create. You can also add more boot devices. It's not limited that you need to only have one, you can have multiple as well and you can define in which order do you want the boot to happen.46:33So we'll just keep it to one for this example and then we'll click it, create the firmware again one more policy that you can create for your use case. This again will be having some options on what firmware version do you want to use and that will also be dependent on.46:53On what.47:12Model number do you have? In our use case, we have C 220M5, so we can select which firmware version do we want to use. We also get to view which is the suggested release or the gold star release for this particular server. We can select that or if in case you want to use a different release for some reason, you can do that, but in our use case we'll.47:13Just go ahead with the recommended one. You can also add more according to your use case. There is also an advanced mode here which gives you the option to not.47:33Do the firmware upgrade for your drives and the storage controllers. You can select that in case you want to do that. But our use case will just upgrade them as well. We'll click create. So this will ensure that when the server boots up, it already has this firmware version that we want it to run.47:43You also have memory configurations in case you want to do dimm block listing, you can do that through this. In case there are some issues on the dimm slots, you can do block listing as well.48:03So that option you have, you can just create it again PCIe connectivity in case you have PCIe devices, you, if you have GPUs or any other PCIe devices, you can ensure the connectivity for that as well.48:20And ok one more thing that I would like to highlight here is that all these options are not required to be configured. Only if you need a particular option you need to configure it. If in case some configuration doesn't make sense for your environment, you do not need to do that configuration. So we'll just leave the PCI connectivity for this particular demo. We'll go to the power.48:35Now, this power profile defines what kind of power utilization are you targeting through this particular system. Now whether you want the power priority to be high, whether do you want it to be medium or low? Do you want.48:55Power profiling enabled at all or not that you can do whether you want to have power restored and you have descriptions of all the options here as well and there is also how much power do you want to give to the processor? Do you want to keep it to default or do you want to it to have maximum power in case your workload demands high power utilization for your.49:12CPU, you can give that as well. And in case you.49:32Wanted to reduce the power usage, you can do that as well. So in our use case, we'll just use that. Okay, another thing, interesting one that is crub policy. In case you are.49:36Configuring a new server and that server was actually utilized somewhere else before and you want to use it as a fresh fresh server and you want the drives of it to not have any particular data from the previous use case, you can do it through scrub.49:53So you can either scrub the disks, you can also scrub the BIOS in case you want to change the BIOS configuration from the previous use case, you can always do the BIOS scrub as well. So both the options are there with you. You can do that using this.50:11Thermal, again, what kind of thermal configurations do you want it to use, whether you want the fans to ramp up, whether how much of the temperature configuration do you want to do that you can do? The virtual media, again, you can create a virtual media policy as well.50:28Where you configure your virtual media as well. So whether you want to enable, whether you want to enable encryption or not, and do you want to use low power USB, all those can be done. You can also add your virtual media from here. If you have an NFS.50:47CIFS or HTTP.51:07S endpoint, you can do that either through SDD or CDD. So we'll just maybe go back and not create it because we do not have an endpoint currently here. So we'll just leave it to default for now. So this.51:08Covers the compute configuration. This will help you to configure every aspect of your con compute related configurations on inter site. Next will be the management. How do you want the management of it to happen?51:27Whether you want to use a certificate that you can do, you can create your certificate policy and use it accordingly. Similarly, you also have IMC access. Now, how do you want your IMC access to work? Whether you want it to be in band, whether you want it to be out of band.51:42And what are the configurations that you want to give to it? So all those can be done from here. You can give an inbound configuration for the management, whether it will go through the fabric interconnect.52:00Or you want it to happen from the management port on the server itself. So both you can do, you can either have IPV four configuration, IPV six as well. You can select your IP pool. If in case you need to create one, you can create it from here as well. I'll just.52:16And create a test IP pool and you can give the details of your IP pool. For this, I'll just probably go back, cancel this.52:33Okay, you can configure IMC access in that way. You can also have a local user. In case you want to have a local user for this particular server or this particular server collection, you can do that as well. This local user will be independent of the other users that are there on.52:50Your inter site or your UCS manager, this will be a different one. You can add your user from here, the username, the role password, and repeat the password once again so that the user will be created. E.g., I'll just create an admin.53:11I'll give them a user privileges and I will just give this password, ok I think admin we cannot create, we'll create admin one.53:27And we'll create it ok local user is created. Do you want to have a land configuration that you can do if in case you want to use SNMP or your management, you can do that. You can.53:43Yes you have a syslog server to which you want to export your syslog messages, you can configure that using syslog as well. If you want to enable the KVM or virtual KVM, you can do that from this configuration.54:03Now in virtual KVM, how many max sessions do you want to run in one particular go? It can be 124 that you can configure here and you also have encryption if in case you want to have encryption enabled for the KVM that is also possible. Now, this is another very interesting option that is tunnel.54:23ABM.54:43Now tunnel KVM is something that will work like a VPN, regardless whether you have access to, to your servers or not, you could be anywhere in the world across the world and you do not have local access to your network on which the servers are running, you can still get access to the KVM.54:44Through inter site if you enable tunnel KVM, that is one very interesting feature that is supported on intercite. It will handle all the configuration in the back end and it will let you access your KVM from anywhere in the world regardless whether you have access to the network or not. So this is again a very.55:04Crucial feature which you get access to when you have the advantage to your license. So if you have that, do enable it and this will help you a lot to manage your servers KVM throughout wherever you are in the world regardless whether you have access to it or not.55:22Okay, so we have all these configurations that we can do. Next we move on to the storage part. Now the storage part, again, there are security aspects to the drives. If you want to enable them, you can do that. For SD card, if in case you have SD cards in your storage servers or in your servers.55:38You can configure the policy for them as well.55:58And for your general storage, you can create a policy for that as well. I'll just create one and show you how it looks like now in case you are using J board for the virtual drive creation.56:01So in that case, you can configure that, you can use the board as well, and you can see which state do you want the unused disks to be at, you can.56:19Configure the drive state, the default drive state, and which are the secured disk slots. So in case you are using Jbot, you can have all these configurations. If in case you are having m.two drives and you want to have rate configuration for them, that can also be done from this. You also have options for M rate.56:36Android controller configurations. There are single zero configurations that you can do if in case you only have one, you can do that and you also have hybrid slot configuration. In case you have any slots, you can do hybrid slot configuration as well. So all these options are supported and it will also depend on what kind of.56:56And where do you have in the server? And if in case you have similar hardware across all the servers, you can.57:15Define your configurations here and that will trickle down to all the servers when you define the profiles from the template. So I'll just maybe go back and close this.57:21So all the storage configurations can be done here. And this will only happen if in case you have storage drives in your servers, if they are compute nodes, then you can avoid the storage configuration. Okay, now we come to the network configuration. Again, a very important thing.57:36For the servers, whether you're using the servers just for network access or you have your SAN connected to it and you have SAN or storage servers, you can configure either LAN or both LAN and SAN for this particular server.57:56So in case we are going to create the land connectivity policy, this is again something that will have a lot of different configurations, so you need to give the various configurations that you'll see.58:14We'll come to the next page. Now in case, in case you want to use as your stack host policy, you can do that. Whether you want to have IQN, it can be a static icon that you define or you can also have a pool that you can create. So our use case will just leave it to.58:29Blank. Now we come to the main part that is the configuration. You can either do a manual placement or you can also do an auto placement. Now you can do that through a graphical editor as well. So there are these two vnics that will be.58:49Mapping to the slot. So this is slot one. So both the vnics will be connected to slot one. So this is how you get to see. You can add more vnics to it go back, I'll come to this section a little later. We can add more vnics for this.59:07And we can also add vnics from the different templates that we have. We saw the vnic template in the configure tab as well. You can create a Vnic from a template, so you can have a template defined for your vnics and you can create vnics multiple vnics from there.59:23You can also add slot to it in case your storage in or in case in your server you are using multiple slots for your network connectivity, you can add slots to it and you can configure the next to particular slots according to your use case. We will go out of this.59:39And so yeah we'll just do manually and we'll just add a vnic. Now we'll give it a name. Yeah.59:58One. Now in case you want to give it a pin group name, you can give it Mac, in case you want, if in case you don't have a Mac pool already defined, you can create a Mac pool from here as well. Now the very.01:00:16Interesting part of using inter site for Mac is, Ashi was also talking about, that the servers are very stateless. In case you want to have Mac address to be specific for a particular server.01:00:36And that server goes down and you want to replace that particular server with a new server, you just take the server profile from one particular server and assign it to the new server. All these UUIDs, all these Mac addresses, all these WWP and WWWN configurations will also move from this.01:00:50To that particular server. So you do not need to reconfigure every server in case you want to move a particular configuration from one server to another. So this is the advantage that you get when you start using inter site for your configurations. So again, I'll just give it.01:01:09Oh, just a random block and we'll just give it maybe 500 as a size. We can add more blocks on Mac as well according to our use case. The limit again here is zero to 1024.01:01:26To create this and this Mac pool will now be used for this particular placement, which switch ID, so this switch ID is actually the fabric interconnect, which switch do you want this to connect to, whether you want to want it to connect to the fabric interconnect a, whether you want it to connect to Fabric Interconnect B, that.01:01:44You can give and you can also define the PCIe order. Now here you give the consistent device naming. So there is a thing called as the CDN where you can either use the name which we defined here.01:02:04For a consistent naming so that everywhere this is named according to that or you can give a user defined name and you can use that as well. If you do not want to use this particular name, you can change it and use a different name as well. We'll just keep it to a unique name.01:02:22Now here there are a lot of other options. You can configure the internet network group, you can configure network control, you can configure QoS, you can also configure that. So we'll see one by one how everything looks like. We will create a ethernet group policy.01:02:37So here you can configure do you want to use eight oh two.1Q tunneling on the.01:02:53And you also need to give which VLANs are allowed on this particular vnic. So to do that, you can either do it from a policy or you can add it manually. So we will just probably give VLAN 121 hundred.01:03:11So if you want to use multiple, you can do it this way. So all these VLANs are now allowed on this particular, so we can also use this show VLAN as ranges or VLAN IDs are the ranges so that we can see which are allowed on this. We can allow more as well in case we need it. And we can also.01:03:27Set a particular as native VLAN in case we want to do that. So that option is also present. For our use case we'll just create it from here. So this does the VLAN configuration. Now we have it in the network control.01:03:47We'll create a policy for that as well. Now here you will configure whether you what kind of configuration do you want to do for this particular in terms of.01:04:03The neighbors. So whether you want to use CDP which is Cisco discovery protocol on this interface, you can enable it if you want. You can do all these kind of configurations for your Mac registered mode. You can do Mac security whether you want to allow it or deny, and you can also use LLDP in case you want to do that. You can.01:04:22Enable both CDP and LLDP as well in case your environment requires that or you can enable either according to your use case.01:04:42We'll create this. Now we go to QoS, now here you can configure the MTU size. If you want to use jump.01:04:49Both names, this is the place where you want to configure them. Now you can configure the rate limit. What kind of priority do you want this particular traffic to have that you can configure here and the burst as well. So all these configurations are available to you. You can configure that and then you click on create.01:05:09Next we come to internet adapter. We create a policy for that. Okay, we go back once.01:05:30So we also have the Cisco provided configuration.01:05:48In case you are using a particular OS, whether it could be Linux, it could be Windows, and in Linux also what kind of Linux do you want to use and what is the hardware that you are using? If in case you are having any devices with Linux, you can just select that and all these options are configured to you. In case you are using VM.01:05:52You can select that, you can also go ahead and select Windows if in case you're doing that. For our use case we'll just go to VMware and select that and then we'll go to next. So all these configurations that are best practice for that particular environment will already be enabled here.01:06:12In case you want to use VXLAN, you can do that. And there are other configurations which you can see here. If in case you want to use GPUs and you have AI workloads, you can enable RDMA, that will help you to get more performance out of your GPUs. And so all these configurations are available.01:06:30To you According to your use case, you can enable them.01:06:50You will have descriptions of all the options in the side of it and you can look at that and then enable it according to your need. We'll just keep it to that and we'll create this. And finally, if you have iSCSI in your environment and you want to boot from there.01:06:54You can create a policy for that as well. And the connection do you want it to be disabled or any other option you can do that. You can also add flow monitors to this particular configuration. For this, we'll just keep it to all these.01:07:14And we'll just click on add, and this will add the to our server on the configuration for this particular template. Similarly, we can add more vnics to it. We can have two or more. And for this example we'll just keep it to one and create this.01:07:29So this was the LAN connectivity policy. Now similarly, in case you're using SAN in your environment or you want to use block storage, you can create a SAN and connectivity policy as well. It is very similar to the LAN, just the namings will be different in place, in place some WWN and WWPN and those kind of things will.01:07:47We did.01:08:07So apart from that, it will all be similar, you will have FC zones that you need to configure and that should be all. So for this, we'll just keep it blank for now in our use case we are not using SAN, so we'll just click on next. And this will show you all the configurations you have done. You can.01:08:08See the configurations from here as well clicking on that eye button.01:08:28And verify whether the configurations look good to you. Similarly for compute management, storage, network, in case there are any errors that also will be visible from here. So once the template is derived or once the template is configured, you can derive profiles out of it.01:08:32So as we are talking about template is the golden image. Profiles are the configurations that actually get deployed on the servers. So profiles are just collections of different policies which gets deployed on one particular server. How does that happen? We'll see here. So we'll click on derive.01:08:50And we can assign it already to a server in case we want to do it. So all these servers are available to us, these three servers we can assign it now. We can do it through resource pool. Resource pool is another concept on inter site where we configure.01:09:07Resources in particular pools and then assign those pools to particular organizations on inter site and then we can allow access to particular organizations to particular resources itself. So we can do that. We can also do it through slot number or the chassis slot location.01:09:24We can do it through serial number in case we have.01:09:44Access to the serial number of all the servers, we can assign them by serial number as well so that you can ensure that the configurations are set to the particular server that you want to configure them to. You can also assign later, so this is one more advantage that you have on inter site in which you can define your server profiles and server profile templates in advance.01:09:48Even before you get your servers on your environment.01:10:08That get delivered to your environment, you can derive and have the profiles ready and as soon as you get the servers, you write them, stack them, and once they are ready and onboarded onto inter site, you can just deploy the profiles on them and the configurations will be ready to go. And you do not need to wait for your servers to come and.01:10:11Then you can start configuring them. So this saves a lot of time in a lot of use cases.01:10:31So in our case, we'll just give it four profiles to be derived and we'll assign later. We're not selecting any server for now. We'll go to next. So these will be the details of the server profiles. Now, this prefix will be used in the name of all the profiles that it creates.01:10:36So you can see these are the four profiles that it will be that it will be creating, that is EIS UCS S P T derived one. If you want to change it, you can do it. Maybe I'll just remove the derived word and just keep it this way.01:10:55Four profiles that have named EIS UI UCS STP and-the number. So 1234 accordingly. In case you want to have more digits in the.01:11:12Device name, you can do that. You can have two digits, three digits according to your wish. We'll keep it to one for now and e.g. you already have four servers that are configured. You want to use four more servers, so what you do is you start from five and keep it in this way so that the next server profiles get.01:11:28Created from five to eight. So you can configure all these according to your use case and just click next. This will give you the summary of what all it will create and then it will start deriving when you click the derive button. So this deriving part is not very required for.01:11:48The use case of provisioning the server, but just I wanted to show you how it looks like when you derive the profiles from it. The profiles I guess are derived now we'll just give it some time to load yes, so you see here, all these are already configured and.01:12:08They are ready to be assigned. So you see the status are not assigned. Once we assign it to a particular server and then deploy it, then the configurations will be set on that particular server.01:12:28For our demo, we only needed the template, so the template is also ready, the EIS UCS SPT. Now we go back to our workflow. We go back to the automate tab, we go back to our workflow, and then we just select the provision bare metal server workflow.01:12:38We'll click this. So these are all the steps that it will be doing. We'll come to it a little later. We'll just go to the general tab 1st where we'll define all our inputs. So we will select our server, maybe we'll select this.01:12:55Select and then we'll go to the server profile template, we'll select the one that we just created, which is this. And then we can either give it a server profile name or it will take the name from the template itself. So either we can do it or we can just leave it.01:13:13Plan. Then we also need to provide the OS image. Now the OS image can be uploaded to inter site.01:13:32Okay, maybe I'll show that to you as well. How do we do that? So we go here at the bottom. Under system you have something called a software repository. So once you go here, you can add the OS image link.01:13:39Over here. You have different options here, NFS, CIFS, HTTPS or you can also have inter site hosted in case if you want to do that, you can upload your image to inter site and inter site can keep it safe for you. So you can do it either way, you can.01:13:55Choose according to your use case. Now we come to this again. We will go back to the general tab, we will select all the options as we were discussing. We will select this server and then we will select the server profile template that we have created.01:14:11So we will select that, we will select our OS image. E.g., we'll just select ESXi seven o. Now we have option to override the secure boot configuration if in case the OS has a particular configuration for secure boot, we can.01:14:31Override that compared to what we have defined on the server profile as well or the server profile template. We can select that. Now we also have option of installation mode. There are three options here. One is Cisco defined installation mode. So this will have all the.01:14:51Configuration that Cisco recommends that you can go ahead with. Else you also have an option for custom in which you need to import your configurations onto it. So you can set your configuration from here and you can set it according to your use case or and you also need to select a SU.01:15:09Image. So this SDU image is dependent on which particular.01:15:29OS you are trying to install and what's hardware you are using. So according to that, you can download and have an SU image. This will again be there on the software repository as we saw in the last section. We can do that.01:15:35And in case a particular ISO already has its configuration embedded within the ISO, we can use the embedded option, and here you can also select an issue image. Now what all tasks will it do? 1st, it will validate all the configuration. In this case, it will validate whether we have the service.01:15:50Defined whether we have the server profile template, can the server and server profile template work together? Can the OS be installed? All these verifications it will do.01:16:10Then it will set the power of the server to onstate. You can see the description of here and you can understand what this particular task will do. Now, each task will have its own inputs and outputs. Now these inputs and outputs you do not need to take care of. You just need to worry about the general tab input.01:16:19All these inputs and outputs will be there for you automatically from the general tab inputs. So all these we have already defined in the previous steps so you do not need to take care of this. And these outputs will go to the next.01:16:39Particular step, this step will take input from the previous task and continue to do that. Now, once the power state of the server is set to on, we then have a new server profile from the template, we derive a particular profile from the template, and then we set the server to the server profile template.01:16:54Once to the server profile. Once the profile is created, we assign the profile to the server.01:17:14And once the server profile is assigned, then we deploy the server profile. Once we start deploying, then the configuration moves to the server itself and we can proceed further. Once the server profile is deployed, all the configurations are moved to the server, we ensure that the server profile is activated and all the configuration.01:17:18Are set properly. Once we ensure that, then we move to.01:17:39The installed targets. Now, this install target will ensure that the server is ready for the installation of OS or not. If it is, then fine, we'll move on to the next step. If not, we will.01:17:44It will of course fail. Then once it succeeds, we move on to the installation itself. Now the installation of server or installation of OS itself is a workflow. So you can see this symbol, it is a workflow in itself. So what does this workflow look like? We can click on this open workflow option here.01:18:00And we can see what the workflow looks like. So these are the tasks in that particular workflow that is, that is just to enable, then we confirm that the server configurations are there. Then we check what type of server it is. So whether it is.01:18:20UCS standalone server, whether it is ucsfi connected server or is it, ok. Probably it's UCSM or IMM server. So once it does.01:18:39Understand which kind of server it is. It does the OS installation accordingly and then we get to a success or failure. So this itself is a workload or workflow which is part of another workflow. So you can nest different workflows together if in case you need to do that. So this is how the workflow will entirely look like.01:18:55In today's session, we will not be showing the entire workflow running because it will take a lot of time, it will take around half an hour to run itself.01:19:14But this is how the entire process of the workflow will look like, and you can start using your workflows according to your use case. So there are all these different workflows that are available to you. Do look at them, do try to understand what it is, what tasks it is using, what are the inputs that you need.01:19:22And you can start using and this can orchestrate and automate a lot of your tasks that you need to do daily and it will help you to save a lot of your time and also help you to ensure that there is NO configuration. There is NO.01:19:42Call, you can ensure that there is consistent configuration across all of your servers with the help of workflows, with the help of profiles, with the help, with the help of templates, policies and rules. So this will cover the entire demo that we had for today.01:19:57But again, maybe I'll just quickly give you a glimpse on just for the people who are interested. I mean I am very interested about Cisco cloud control and this will soon be coming to everyone and everyone can get an access to it, but as we have a tech preview of it, we'll just show you how it looks like.01:20:12We'll go to this. We have option to select which tenant, so we have multiple tenants here. We can select which tenant we want to use. And similarly we have, we should have had a system.01:20:30Okay, it's taken to the different page. Okay, I think there is some issue because of which I'm not able to see the assistant option.01:20:49Here it should come up here. Again, this is a tech preview so we are expecting that there are some changes that they are doing it in the backend before releasing it to the public. But again.01:21:07We will probably show you in the next call, in the next session that we have next week. We'll try to have some aspects of it if possible. Again, this was just a glimpse that we wanted to show, but again we can show it in the next call. So this concludes the demo that we had for today. Thank you for sticking around and we will now.01:21:18Pass the ball back to Pratibha to conclude today's session. Thank you, Ronak. Thank you for that extensive demo. Let me share my screen.01:21:36So in our previous sessions, we've always got requests to spend more time on the demo to show you details of what all is available and how can you use these features best in your environment. So that is why we tried to make sure that this was a demo intensive session.01:21:53Thank you Runak, for covering that. So before we could go to a summary and the next steps, a quick question for all of you. Do you plan to use workflows for your next server provisioning?01:22:14OS installation or any other task, you could either tell yes or if you you're still not sure and you need some support from us even after this session, ok, I see two people saying definitely yes, glad that helps. But if any of you need some additional support.01:22:29Or if you have any specific questions we'll share.01:22:50The mailer address, our mailer address on the space. You could drop us an email and we can take them up even after the session. So please, you know, be assured that this is not just a 90 min session where you come, you learn something and you go. We want you to go back and try it out in your environment and tell us.01:22:54If there are any challenges that you are facing. So thank you so much for this response. Now, what are the next steps? But before that we'll do a quick recap. We started with why do we have UCS and how UCS revolutionized the data center design. We spoke about how it.01:23:14Brings your managing of your compute servers, your lands and your management into a single infrastructure. We also spoke about how the most important thing is the stateless computing, which means the identity of a server is not bound to the hardware, but it's bound to these templates and pro.01:23:35Profiles that run up extensively covered. So even if you have to replace the hardware, all you have to do is unassociate that profile from the server, replace the hardware, and then associate the profile to the new server and you're good to go. You don't have to reconfigure the new server from scratch all over again. The next one is policy.01:23:54Hierarchy, so we spoke about domain which is your FI related configuration, your chassis and your server policies related to your compute nodes. And lastly automating the life cycle. So through the workflows, you know, through your hardware complaints list, maybe policies for your phone.01:24:14Upgrade. So all of that could be done to automate your life cycle. So this is a summary of this session.01:24:35Now, what are some things that you can do after this? I'll always start with, you know, the environments where we are still using UCS manager mode. I would highly recommend that for a start, you can claim your servers on inter site start using the monitoring features.01:24:43But later, you know, make sure that you move from your UCSM managed mode to inter site managed mode to use inter site for your policy management and the workflows that we just discussed, and also you don't need to do it on a per domain or a per fabric basis, so you can.01:25:03Do this across domains. So, if you need any support, you know, claiming your devices on inter site, even if you're having UCS managed mode or moving from UCS managed mode to inter site managed mode, all of these just let us know. As I was saying we do have sessions planned for the transition as well.01:25:23In the future in the roadmap, stay tuned for that.01:25:43You can structure, so we spoke about profiles and templates, but, you could also you know set up organizations, resource groups, role based access, and I know in the chat we also received some security best practices and requirements that, you know, we were yet to respond to, so all of that.01:25:47You could define that beforehand and finally go to your templates, deploy it to your servers and watch the server configuration server profile configuration drift and in terms of your compliance. So again, 1st step, if you've not claimed all your maybe V centers, maybe your hypervisors are still not claimed on inter site, go ahead do that.01:26:07Because you can integrate a lot of pieces together to intercite. Then you start using workflows and templates to configure this.01:26:27Now just before we close, I know we have 3 min just before we close a quick one, on Cisco IQ, we've been covering this in the past as well. Cisco IQ is a platform that Cisco has you know released recently for everybody who has any sort of contract with Cisco, any sort of.01:26:35Support contract. So it's not something where you need an additional license. You don't have to pay for it. As long as you have any contract, even basic contract for that matter, you can start using Cisco IQ. This is a digitized way of your of getting professional and support services which is personalized, predictive and proactive.01:26:55For your environment. You can monitor your assets, your contract support information, your LDOS information, you can monitor assessments, which means psirts, vulnerabilities, recommendations, which of your assets maybe divided by location or geography or even different.01:27:15Technologies right data center, enterprise that is impacted by these assessments, what are some recommendations to fix them and you could also monitor your tag cases, your rmas, who is it pending on, and so on with just three steps, all you have to do is go to iQ.cisco.com, create an account, select.01:27:35Whether you want, you know, your storage location to be somewhere in EMEA US or APJC. And finally you can start adding your Cisco contracts and managing your assets through IQ. Again, like I said, this is not licensed. You just need a support contract which most of you would already have for your devices, so you don't need any.01:27:55Anything in detail to get started.01:28:15So with that being said, what's next? We will share some resources with you regarding UCS, inter site IQ. We also will share the link where you can register for the future sessions and also watch the sessions of the past recordings. Please bookmark them and keep, and also we have the next session.01:28:18On 17 September, we'll be covering UCSX unified edge, and a lot more. We have the quick recap and live Q and A session on the subsequent Thursday, so if you have any questions, if you can go back, try out these things, and let's say you have some questions, you can come ask us live and we'll take them up or if you want.01:28:38Reach out to us over email, that's our mailer address, ask-expert insights-C AI@Cisco.com.01:28:58So you can reach out to that, to us using that as well. Thank you so much once again for staying with us for 90 min. If you have any feedback on what other sessions would you like us to schedule or if you have any specific challenges that we can help you with, you will see a survey flash.01:29:04Right in front of you as you leave this webinar. Please do take 2 min to fill in your fill in details there that will really help us to shape the future sessions.01:29:24With that, thank you once again and thank you Ronak, for an extensive demo and to Terrence as well for helping us with some questions on the Q and A Thank you everyone. Have a good day ahead. Thank you and see you all in the next week's session.01:29:34