What's new with Cisco Intersight

Oh, something as well that we would like you to to.00:00To share with you is, e.g., the, the three pillars of excellence, e.g., that, that we keep in in in either side alright? So basically the transformation that we are looking for, you know, with the with interset platform and with the within the data center environment, you know, actually it's built on three from the.00:15You know, and for operational excellence. We look for management and scale.00:36We are looking for assistant operations and integrating different ecosystems, you know, for maximize, e.g. existing technology or investments that you have or and your already existing infrastructure so you can use them and integrate into your current infrastructure, so that's something that we would like.00:43To to to you to keep in mind in order e.g. in in with the assist operations we'll we'll look for minimizing downtime and optimizing resources e.g. and strengthen the security, the senior posture with with intelligence and proactive proactive insights we that's something that during the last presentation.01:03Of this series we have shared with you as well you know with different predictive analytics or proactive support, you know, for for your infrastructure and automated monitoring. This is something that is going to help you, you know, to be more to be faster in the in the res.01:24Response in being able to have extra time e.g. for designing and building your infrastructure. All right?01:43Now, talking about, new features, you know or new features and new capacities on intersite, something to keep in mind here is if you remember, we have different platforms, right? We have different platforms, I mean the for for the platform we have different ways to deploy it, you know, different deployments.01:50Options, I'm sorry. We have the SaaS environment, we have the the connected virtual appliance or even the private virtual appliance, but inter site team is constantly working on new features, you know, to add to an infrastructure, to make them to make it available and as well for, for you to start using it and and spreading the world.02:10You know about the the the availability of these new features. Now, the ones that we're gonna show you during the next minutes are just a few of them in a, in the demo, in the demo part, my colleague is gonna show you in this case Joe is gonna show you how you can go and see what is what is next. What is new.02:30Now what is new now and what is next as well? You know, what is coming or what are the events e.g. the expected time frame for new features that will be installed and as well in case you want e.g. to suggest a new feature, there are ways for you to send your new your ideas to the inter site development team so they can.02:50Eventually add this new features in the the in on the inter site platform. Now, we're gonna start a little bit with with the organizations on inter site, alright?03:10This is interesting because, e.g., if you're familiar with UCS manager or even UCS central, you already know that there is an organizational hierarchy, you know, that has existed in these environments from these solutions UCS manager or even in in UCS central.03:22From even from from their inception alright so these two these two platforms, they have two main capabilities, alright that they are namely the the namely police resolution and default policies, you know, that actually have proven.03:42Times to be some kind of a barrier, e.g., when trying to adopt inter site managed mode, you know, for some customers. And e.g., if you remember.04:02The policy resolution was like a building capacity and as I mentioned in UCS manager and UCS Central and basically create different levels, different organizational levels that can be nested or or create sub organizations logically connected.04:12One to another and for for for for base for name based policy resolution, e.g.. And, just to give you an example, if a server pro server profile is located e.g. inside of a nested sub organization, so the resolution path for each policy lookup will know.04:29Only extend.04:49From the super organization where the server provider lives all the way up the to the hierarchy to the root level, you know, which is basically at the top of the UCS measure or or UCS central organization organizational hierarchy. So the root organization is basically the system defined and and it is.04:50It cannot be altered or or even deleted, right? So that's sometimes that maybe a little inconvenience because even e.g. you have policies that you want to share across different domains or or server profiles that you have already created and using on on any specific UCS manager domain or you.05:10Talking about the UCS manager, you are not able to share that specific construct to another domain, so that's something that you will have to start from the scratch building it. And that's something that will create some sort of complications or not will not be so.05:33Smoothly in terms of managing, right? Now, intersight actually in terms of management included something that all the or the scheme or the organization scheme introducing Intersight is part of the role based access control feature scheme that you have.05:51You access and basically this is.06:11A flat structure alright there is NO hierarchy like it used to be on the UCS manager or ECS central. And basically the organizations are logical containers that can hold different structures, e.g., logical structures including e.g. policies, pools, profiles or.06:14Or templates if you will, and as well physical resources like server storage, UCS domains, like physical physical targets that you are already included on your inter site instructure, so that's something that that you need to keep in mind. So.06:34When you all have, e.g., this physical resources, you group them in something that we call resource groups, alright? Resource group is this logical arrange that normally groups different physical different physical equipment and a physical resource, you know.06:52In the into a resource group can be managed or accessed by multiple organizations, alright so all of these concepts are part of the, of this role based access control because e.g. when you create a when you create a physical I'm sorry, a resource group and you.07:11You added to an organization that's something that can be accessed by users with, with a set of roles or which is basically a collection of privileges to access these resources, and normally these roles are assigned for or they have access to one or multiple organizations. All right, so.07:31Something that is.07:51That that basically is connected to the the policy resolution feature, you know, from inter site, I'm sorry from UCS manager and UCS central, is basically used to share the configuration, e.g., from multiple devices on your own.07:54Or how from an organization to multiple organizations. And this is something that we call the configuration sharing across organization. All right? And this is basically a feature that addresses the customer desired segmentation of organizations, you know, using the role based access control, but as well.08:13You know, applying the all the role based access control rules facilitating basically the different when you have a large a large or when you have a large scale enterprise e.g. or environment or or even e.g. the level of a service provider and you want to facilitate the access.08:33To the different resources and sharing configuration as well. You can create on either say managed mode you can create a like a route or or like on a specific organization where you can share their resources that you have into that organization to other organizations for them to consume those resources.08:53E.g., you can add to this organization, which is not basic, by the way, it's not like the default organization because the inter site platform has by defect a default organization when you basically or the automatically the infrastructure will deposit all of these constructs, e.g., all of these objects.09:14That are added to to the inter site platform when created on an inter site platform, e.g., when you add a new target or when you create a new policy or a new server profile and you don't assign in a specific organization, they will go to the default organization. But.09:34Depending on how you are planning your infrastructure, you can create and a special organization, but in this case is named default, but you can put the name of what you want and you can share the resources that you put into that organization with a specific set of organization with one or two. So for.09:51For them to have access to different profiles or policies or even finward or or or different pool resources that you want to put into that organization that you want to share with them. All right? That's this is something that's what this is gonna give you so much agility with within your infrastructure because.10:10You will have the the possibility to share these things from one domain to another and start, you know, the working on the and a configuration in a massive scale. So this is something that we highly recommend to explore and use.10:31Right, so that there are different, e.g., objects, you know, that you can e.g. create from an organization that we're gonna call in this case the consumer organization and I'm sorry from the source organization and then the consumer is going to basically, as the word says, consume these different resources, e.g..10:48The chassis templates, the server profiles, server pro server profile templates pools, domain profiles, all of the resources that you have in this chart right here can be created and shared, you know, with from this sharing configuration sharing across organization feature, alright?11:08Now, what for when when all this is created in a properly way, as you remember, you will have the organization with different privileges, but the, you will have a user that you will have access to different roles. The roles remember is basically a collection of of rights or or proof.11:27Privileges to access the resources in different organizations, so and a specific role can have access to multiple organizations with the different privileges and the resources that belongs to that organization, different resource groups, which basically can be assigned just to one organization and can be accessed to multiple organizations. That's, that's the beauty of the role based.11:47Access control scheme. So a single user can have the keys to access multiple organizations with the resources that you have right there. So and you can limit, you know, with, e.g., if you are an an account administrator, you can limit the access level that each role in.12:07Each user assigned to that specific role is gonna have, right? So that's, that's important to keep in mind. And these lead us to something that has been introduced recently and now that we're talking about roles and access, you know, for, for different organizations, this is.12:28Do that we call the custom privilege sets. If you already have worked with role based access control, you maybe familiar with the concept of, system defined and user defined roles.12:47Right, so basically inter site as a platform is going to allow you to or is going to include a set of roles, which is remember a collection of privileges, you know, for a specific, for a specific role that is going to be assigned to a user, but now with the customer that.13:01With the with the custom privilege step, intersite is is providing you.13:21The, I mean beyond the system defined privileges, it will give you the access to create user defined privileges in a more granular way, alright? So it will allow you to have a more precise control over user access for your, for your IT staffers.13:29And, so the the system remember the system defined privileges are prepacked sets of permissions, but you can modify, e.g., in more granular way what you will have, you know, for, for your users. So these privileges may include, e.g., more formation.13:48Well, I mean when when when having e.g. this this user defined privileges, you may include more permissions than needed for any specific role or for a specific task, right? So with user defined privileges, you can create this user defined roles with more as mentioned and more granular privileges to meet your, your operational needs.14:05So, e.g., you can do something like, I don't know, like allow one network administrator, e.g., to view server information for for for monitoring and diagnosis without granting any configuration or managing management access, e.g.. In in a personal way, I have a customer in Brazil that have been.14:25Able to use this and and they they they they have been they have they found this very useful because they have this one of these teams that is in charge only for monitoring, you know, and eventually diagnosis, but they wanted to limit more or or for any specific different users, you know, to limit the access to their to the infrastructure, so that.14:45That's something that can be done. And as well, e.g., if you're a server administrator, you, e.g., you will be unable to view all the networking infrastructure, e.g., the networking infrastructure details without any permission to modify or manage it or or modify, e.g., you can modify an existing role and.15:05Even remove a privilege, I don't know, e.g., remove the security privilege for different administrator. That's something that comes to my mind and add an alarm for an acknowledge acknowledgement privilege for a server operating role. So the options are very, very wide open. You will have over.15:2507:50 privileges available, alright and.15:46Normally they start from this 17 system defined privileges sets. So when you, when you click on each of these system defined privilege sets, you will open a key, you know, a subset of different privileges that you can select in a way that you prefer, you know, it's is.15:50It's it's pretty, pretty awesome because you will, you'll be able to select the way that you want. All right, the next feature is something that already existed on inter site since the conception, but it has more capability more more more features, and it is basically the.16:08The email notifications back in the day you were when, when, when accessing inter site you have the option to create email notifications when an alarm arrives on inter site, you know, from any of your infrastructure that you are managing from inter site and alarm is created, so you won't be able to create.16:29An alert, you know, to receive a notification about a specific alarm that has been raised on on intersite. But now.16:49The the email notification filtering allows you for modified, you know, the different options that you have right there. Not only for alarms but as well you will be able to create or receive notifications with security advisories or field notices or any other.16:57Advisories has been detected, you know, for the infrastructure that you are administrating. So in that in that manner, you will have an option to set, e.g., a rule and and and select which email addresses will be receiving the notification, not only for the alarms but for one of these security advisories for.17:16Notices and analyte advisories that at some point they are really important to keep in mind but eventually does those are like advisory that needs to be attended depending on the severity that they have and they need to, they require an action to be taken on your infrastructure, e.g., to avoid any potential risk on.17:36On on inter site or your infrastructure that you are managing. So you can create this and and select which kind of advisory you wanna set on this rule and which person are going to receive this, this filtering. All right? So.17:56In this case, you will see in the, on on the on the screenshot, the different filters that you can create. E.g., you know, you, you can as well select what kind or what part of your infrastructure you want to receive any specific alarm. E.g., you, you can create a rule, but by the end of the day you.18:12You have to receive all the alarms from the whole infrastructure, but e.g., if you're creating different organizations, you know, with different users that belongs to that organization, you can select as well which components, alright, or which is which are the the sources of these alarms you know that are going to be included in this.18:32Rules, e.g., in a specific domain or in a specific host name, you know, for any specific server or or so depending on the filter you wanna put right there, you, you can e.g. create a rule in order to send the the notification ones for all or part of the the filter.18:52Sort of conditions are met, so that's, that's something that you, you will be you have the free to to do. One of the limitations so far you can create, e.g., you can add up to 20 emails per rule alright for maybe 20 users. And as well.19:12You can create up to 40 rules, you know, for 40 rules per account and up to five filter conditions. All right? This is something that over time is is being always modified and we are adding more capacity, but so far today, up to today is this is the the limits. All right?19:28So, alarms within 10 s are bundled in one email for up to ten alarms. E.g., there is an infrastructure that is raising a bunch of alarms in a short period of times, all these alarms will be bundled in one email notification for you to receive it and avoid, you know, having multiple.19:48Or or or a bunch of email notifications in your, in your inbox, right? This is another one that has been introduced as well. The email notification filtering, basically.20:08As as we see alright basically different this is very interesting because this this is very recent and and it will allow the, allow you as a user to.20:23Define specific conditions, you know, that will trigger an alarm. Generally speaking, e.g., the devices or or the, the, the.20:43The devices or or or the targets that you're already managing on either site will we'll raise some alarm depending on the codes that the the generate the the alarms, you know, then specific conditions, you know, these are predefined or system defined alarms that will or system defined events that will generate an alarm. But in.20:54This case, you can now define which conditions will trigger the alarms for different specific metrics. E.g., as a host energy, e.g., transmission or reception utilization, you know, for for interface CRC errors.21:13Or link failure err errors, you know, it will en enable you to, you know, a more proactive monitoring for, for your infrastructure, right? So you can customize the alarms, you know, that you want to receive.21:33So, in terms of these metric alarm rooms, there are a couple of concepts that you need to keep in mind and the 1st one is basically the alarm, the metric alarm rooms in the the alarm rule, the rule itself act as a container basically that is going to hold one or more associated thresholds.21:49Definitions, alright? So these rules these rules are assigned to target devices.22:09Including e.g. servers, fabric interconnects or or even chassis, you know, to enable this this this specific rule, right? So remember, the rule basically is going to contain, you know, the, the different thresholds. And now within the rule that you are configuring, you are going to.22:16Create or or define the threshold or the threshold definitions, alright? And these are tied to individual metrics, alright? They are, you're going to set the metrics and define what are the topper, the upper, I'm sorry and the lower thresholds for any specific metric, alright? And normally each definition will.22:36Well it will when you create it will specify how many data point data points must cross or trigger a limit you know winning a sliding window of time and it will determine basically the type of alarm you will need to set the what what is what type of alarm is this, you know, when.22:56In the threshold is, is it a warning or is this a critical Depending on your threshold, you will define for my infrastructure, is this just a warning or this is critical for me, right? And, that will be raised for that metric in the and basically in the data points to trigger this is something that you will see later.23:16In the data points to trigger field, you can, you will specify the number of data points required to trigger this alarm and out of the total number of points that will be evaluated, you know, this is something that inter site will be monitoring constantly, alright? So you will be able as well to select the granularity level, you know.23:36There is a dropdown menu that that will help you to define, you know, the sliding window, you know, for this trigger and.23:56That that will be the part of the whole configuration that you will see, alright so then when you are created, e.g., this threshold, you need to select which is the device where do you this alarm rule in the the threshold is going to be applied as well.24:05Alright, so this enhanced with, e.g., with the email notification filtering will I'll give you the tools, you know, to create.24:25Basically, the alarms that you're interested to see and create the the the specific notifications, you know, to receive on your email and to have a more proactive monitoring of your infrastructure. All right?24:36The next one is something that we call the granular suppression rules. All right? In general, something that that we we already talk is alarms basically are essentials for alerting you when any failure or any event or any threshold now that we talked already about the the metric alarm rules, but.24:52When any threshold breaches, e.g., for, for any kind of environment, but this is specifically useful for large scale environments that e.g. when when you have a a large environment and depending e.g. if you're running a maintenance window or or or any specific event in, in that environment.25:11The could be can be moments where the an overwhelming amount of notification is produced, e.g., right? Something happened in your infrastructure and the alarms are popping up and you don't want to see that. Normally when you go to the server, there is an option to suppress the alarms.25:33No, for that server for a period of time, you know, but it will suppress all the alarms. With granular suppression rules, you will define basically a logical criteria you will be capable of have more granularity to select what kind, what type of alarms the severity.25:5330 and different property options, you know, that you can configure, you know, to limit e.g. the the pop up of these alarms, the suppression of these alarms for a period of time, alright so with this in mind, it will not trigger or it will not elevate a email notification. All right? So when doing.26:13Doing this normally in the in the user interface, this suppress alarms will be listed in when you go to the alarm section on inter site, there is an individual tab that is called suppress suppress tab where all the suppressed alarms are gonna be there. All right, so part of the different.26:33Configurable options e.g. that you you will be able to select or or verify when doing this is and check e.g. the name of the alarm, the description, what kind of the status, e.g., the alarm has, e.g., if it's the administrative state of the rule, e.g., that you're creating.26:55Is enabled, is disabled, the different conditions will display you e.g. the filter criteria, you know, the different properties that you are selecting, e.g., for, for the suppression and as well the start date and the end date. All right, for that for that rule. All right? And if you there was e.g. a modifica.27:14You will see e.g. the last date of or that rule to be modified or or that was modified. So this is pretty, pretty awesome because depending on on where you want to apply this, and if you are planning or on a specific event or a management event or or or something in your infrastructure that you want to avoid this popping up of this all alarms or notification.27:34You can prepare your infrastructure to to do it this way, ok?27:54Now, server diagnosis capability pretty much is allow you to, e.g., you will be able to run in a specific diagnosis actually this is done from the server dashboard and normally this is used before installation.27:58Or e.g. or or before putting in the server into into production environment or something, you will make sure that the hardware components are working in or they are working properly before putting to work and it will.28:17Facilitate, you know, customers to perform like a, like a quick health check, you know, for, for this Howard and and and improving all the the experience, you know, event because depending on the results of this diagnosis on the server, you will have an option to run different actionable insights and different options. So this is something that.28:35Will, that will be available for you on and eventually depending on the status of this diagnosis, you will require, e.g., to raise a tag case or or e.g. depending you will show you will be shown different steps that you need to to run e.g. during the diagnosis, but eventually you in case.28:54If you need it, you can open a tag case for, for, for assistance on this matter. So the diagnosis capability is something really, really useful.29:14All right, now, network I'm sorry any inter site basically was included as a policy, you know? So but the ones that are familiar, you know, that basically is useful, you know, for, for visibility into, to, to check, you know, the.29:23Different network flows, you know, and this is pretty much used in, in every UCS domain. You will be able to create a policy, you know, so to you can to create or or or export, you know, like different flow records for you to you for you to using your different analytic tools. So eventually.29:43You will be capable of creating this policy model on either site remember, when creating a policy, you need to apply it to or or add it or attach it to a server profile, and then this server profile needs to be.30:03Oh I'm sorry in a UCS domain profile I'm sorry. This is something that needs to be attached in a UCS profile. Well, as a matter of fact, when creating a policy as well, you need to to attach that to a server profile, but in this specific matter, with netflow, you need to attach it to a UCS domain profile, and this is supported on in fabric interconnects.30:18Generation four meaning like the 6400 and the 5th, the end the 6th generation, you know, of our interconnection as well in the UCS series direct, so this will be very helpful, you know, to start monitoring, you know, the different network flows on your UCS domains as well.30:39Right? The group power, the group power keeping is something that is gonna be really useful e.g. for your you as a manager to have a like a closer eye because this is something that the the.30:57Wasn't before and you will be able to set a collective power usage limit, you know, for the for a group of devices. It could be servers, fabric interconnects or fabric extenders, and it will give you the capability, the capacity to manage.31:13Dynamically, you know, and optimize as well, you know, the power consumption in your infrastructure and eventually prevent outages or even to maximize the maximize the capacity or depending e.g. in how your infrastructure is, you know, to, to, to keep the business continuity, you know.31:33Using e.g. a a policy driven control model on inter site alright, so you will be able to create this power group. And e.g., there are like different use cases that you can keep in mind, e.g.. The.31:53E.g., for power data center power optimization, e.g., you can ensure that the total power drawal, you know, for for of a server group for when you create a server group does not exceed, e.g., the available power budget, you know, if you have defined this by per rack.32:12Or role or even per per facility you know so it will it will allow you to, e.g., install more servers without our positioning or provisioning, I'm sorry power infrastructure. And as well, as a matter of fact, this is something interesting because if you already have an infrastructure already install.32:30It's you know when on your side you will be able to extract power consumption, you know, for that infrastructure. This is something that normally when designing a data center is kind of difficult, you know, defining or or trying to create a.32:50Try to when when you're trying to install whole infrastructure and, guess how much energy you're going to consume, you know, create like like a forecast of of power consumption and depending on what whatever you have or or what what is the amount of or or the size of the server so the.33:06Infrastructure you start like kind of guessing, you know, how many BTUs or how many, how many watts or how many power you're going to consume from that infrastructure. But now when inter site you will have a, that kind of information available actually you can create a, a dashboard and select the, the, the devices where you want to monitor and see how much.33:25Power you're consuming, and in this case the the group power capping is, is something very, very, they have more capacity, you know, to the power management. E.g., as well, you can prevent power outages, you know.33:45Because, you can protect protect your infrastructure infrastructure I'm sorry against circuit overloads, you know, by dynamically capping a group a group power consumption. And as well you you will reduce potential risks of shutdowns.33:57Or or or trip records, you know, so that's something as well. And when having as well cloud or multi tenant tenant environments.34:17You, you will be able to have like a fair power allocation. You can create like you can allocate allocate power in a more fair way among different tenants or even departments that you have in your in your organization, and as well by by capping, you know, the power usage per group.34:28You will, you will even have the capacity to support service level agreements, you know, for, for different data center resources. So that's something to keep in mind. And even e.g. with this recovery, and energy savings, so during the when you have outages or or or or backup.34:44The Power US UPS or or e.g. you have generator in your infrastructure, you can ensure you know that the group's consumptions stays you know winning the available limits right before all the power, the power is back, you know, depending on what you're using UPS or generator, so.35:04You will be able to keep working, you know, these critical workloads and minimizing downtime. So that's that's something as well very useful that we added recently. All right?35:25This one is something that that has been added more capacity because if you remember the hardware compatibility list is something that has been included on inter site since his creation. And since the conception.35:37The HCL helps you to, basically, monitor or or or or check e.g. if your current infrastructure is, supported, you know, for any specific operating system. But in this case or inter site will allows you, you know, for this hardware.35:53Capability is already in incorporated in the in the inter site infrastructure to evaluate, you know, each server, you know, against user defined hardware compatibility baselines and to check e.g. the compliance status based on the defined configurations basically.36:13With the hardware compatibility list. So this this the custom hardware compatibility list. So this feature will enable like self validation of servers, you know, to ensure the compliance and the the consistency for them, right? So.36:33In terms of limits so far, there is a maximum of ten, a hundred baseline configurations that can be created in a single account. This eventually will be will be increased, but so far is a hundred baseline configurations.36:50A normally a baseline status is created at the organization level, you know, for, for each server when a baseline configuration is defined, and normally the compliance status for each server is reevaluated, whatever, e.g., there are changes.37:05On on on the on the on the baseline configuration. E.g., you introduce a new change, this is going to be reevaluated, you know, to, to make sure that it's complying, you know, with the, with the baseline HTL. So this is something to, to keep in mind that you can start using as well on your site alright?37:23Okay, in terms of logical configuration backup, this is something interesting because e.g. you will be able to perform a configuration level backup, you know, contain, e.g., all logical managed objects, alright and it will start to you know starts where.37:43Workflows to perform backup operations, e.g..38:03And as well you will be able to preserve the identity of all the servers or all the infrastructure, you know, that are contained in the backup and it will be applied consistently during the restore restoring the operations alright so you will be able as well to visualize all the backup components when when when using this backup configuration.38:07The the backup components feature and.38:27You'll have the capacity to set as protected these backup components to prevent, you know, a backup from being deleted, you know? So normally there are, there is a maximum of 50 backup, backups that you can configure with this option on Intersight, and normally when you surpass this amount, the.38:32This one will be automatically deleted, so keep in mind this because this is going something that you can start using as well on intersite.38:52Alright, in terms of APIs, this is there has been some improvements, something that was recently added is the the change log, you know, this is something that is coming soon, to be, to be fair, but something that is ongoing, something that isn't being.39:01I mean the API changelog is coming soon, but it's basically it's gonna be a page that is going to track all the API updates across the inter site releases. This is something that eventually if you are integrating inter site with other platforms, you will be, you will find this very useful. So if you are a developer.39:19E.g., you can check, e.g., the monitor the evolution of the different versions of foreign API for for your infrastructure as well. So it will, it will be very helpfully as as developers. And e.g..39:39The API content content update is pretty pretty much the site that will show you all object API object descriptions with different improved parameter definitions for you to find what is new, you know, for in a specific API object, alright? So, it will change or do an.39:54More standardized layout, you know, for, for, for being more easy for being more easy or easier to to read, you know, when in within the website so this is something.40:13As well that is available. In terms to that center or code repo, this is something that was recently added in the developer center on inter site. Actually, e.g., when you go to help on on inter site in the top right corner, there is an option there for you to.40:23Access the developer center and this called repository basically is is how you know that will store different scripts and tools, you know, for related e.g. to inter site, it will provide you different options, you know, we're ready to use Cisco validated designs.40:43And as well, you will have access to different community community contributions, you know, for different users, you know, for, for use reusing different scenarios or different coding that you can, you know, include in your your current platform, so it will be very helpful for you because this specific repository will reduce the time for you to.41:03To, you know, research in different platforms and everything, so all this information will be included in this call repository, ok?41:23The code sample as well, you know, in, in the for for developers basically is going to provide you different different examples, you know, code examples where, e.g., for creating and depending on if you are using automating automation tools, e.g., you can.41:33Three different server profiles and policies, you know, so eventually will help you to have available, you know, or or enabled, you know, automation in your infrastructure, you know, for, for server configuration by having availability of different script templates that you can apply on your on your tools, you know? So this is something that can.41:52Work, you know, as a.42:13As a, as a reference template, you know, for for different configurations when when you are in including different tools for programmability, e.g., Python or or Ansible or even terraform or PowerShell, so you already have the the coding you know ready to include, you know, in these different tools.42:14Well so you will have the the the code sample on the developer center, so.42:34I will, I will recommend you for you to take a look at this, ok? Ansible models, this is something that well basically it's, it's pretty much a collection of different ansible.42:40Ansible models for different environments as well, alright? So that this basically we added over 75 Ansible models in during the last six six months and as well this is something that you can check and and start using, you know, because these are adapted, you know, for different Cisco intersite tasks.42:55So my recommendation is you to keep an eye on on the Ansible models that we have available.43:15Another thing that we have is the inter site called gen. Basically, it will convert e.g. the the user interface actions, e.g., into ready to use coding, you know, for, for Python or PowerShell. All right? So instead of doing this manually, you know.43:21It will automate the, the script creation for the different workloads that you want to implement on inter site or even with other desks. So with the access e.g. the the software the SDK, the kits, you know, the software development kits and and APIs. So it will, it will generate a.43:40Already you know different examples that you can apply in your environment. So that's well will be highly recommended for you to access and start getting familiar with the inter site code Gen.44:00In terms of ecosystem integration, this is something very useful as well. Vmware Cloud Foundation operation basically is is an extension, you know, or I'm sorry, observability actually allows you to, you know.44:13See building a secure manner, you know, manage as well and and operate different applications and and infrastructure from your your cloud environments or even all the way to, to the edge environments. So when you, when you use BCF to optimize and and you can use it to optimize and.44:33Private cloud environments you know with with workload balancing if you will, and placement, you know, increasing or or working in your security and and integrated compliance as well, you know, taking advantage of the security and the integrated compliance. All right? So the the the ACF operations management pack, you know.44:53Is something that is available for, for Cisco Intersight to use on on CVF, sorry BCF operations and basically you will, you have an extensive capability in in in the in the in the cloud foundation, in VMware cloud foundation with some inter site capability that you can down that you can do right there, ok? So remember.45:12Sure, just, just for you to you're not familiar, the VCF operations as well is known as area or or maybe you remember the very realized operations or VR ops. So that's something that that you you can you can keep using. Actually I'm gonna share in the chat.45:32Only for for this specific one that I have here. All right? Okay, something as well with the red Hat OpenShift installer. This is something new.45:51Actually, e.g., do you you can you can you can start using the the the assistant starter e.g. when you require so e.g. manual manual boot from from from discovery ISO files, so basically inter site will help you to automate things the the booting, you know.46:07Yeah, using the BMC access, you know, so this is something that is available as well. This wasn't it won't require API calls or or store API keys needed, you know, for integrating both platforms, but this is something that you can start using when creating or adding a house using the.46:26The openshift installer mostly well now that we are, we talked a few weeks ago, e.g., about the, the AI parts using the openshift installer. Basically, when using OpenShift tools, there was a problem, you cannot boot, you know, the operating system from from openshift. So basically inter site automates the booting.46:46With this enhanced on on the assisted installer for Red Hat openshift.47:06Right? This is something that's gonna be available for the intercept login for the openshift web console, this is expected. There there's not commitment but it's expected you know change dates can change for the Q2 the calendar year, this this 20.47:13In 2026 and basically it's it's a plugin integration you know between inter site and OpenShift web console as well.47:33I'm going at this moment to hand it over to my friend, Don. I'm sorry Joe for the demo part. He has a few pretty cool demo components here that he wants to show you so Joe.47:46Let me make you a presenter and you are ready to go. Awesome. Great. Thank you Stephen. Wanted to make sure everybody can hear me, ok? My screen shared. Great, thanks.48:03For audience, I'm sharing my screen. You should, should see what I see here. I was just starting off on some inter site there. So let me switch to my super bright default tab there and just to take you from point A, which is the topic of today's session.48:21Which is what's new intersight. So explicitly when we say what's new inner site, we are going to be referring to what you can dig into if you go to inter site.com in your browser and where you might normally log in.48:40Or create an account if you haven't before, want to draw your attention down to what's available in the bottom right hand corner of the screen. You'll see several items there and we want to focus on the one that says help center. So if you can see my cursor.48:58Hovering over help center, we will left click on help center and this will take us to the inter site help center. It will default to the Help Center for the SaaS, the software as a service, which is the where we're gonna focus on today's.49:16Just be aware that dropdown box can also lead you to the help center for the appliance if that's what you're running, as Stephen said, the deployment configurations allow for onsite connected or private appliances where you can run intersight.49:31You can find help there. But today's conversation is gonna center around the software as a service, so we're gonna stay with that default help center and over on the left there, we have several options there.49:48Want to make sure that you do know there's videos, there's troubleshooting, there's resources there, lots of links. The one that we want to focus on there is called What's New, obviously there at the top, we're gonna left click on what's new.50:04And we will be right here at the what's new homepage and as you can see, there's two tabs, one for released and one for upcoming. So obviously the one that's released is gonna show us what has already been put out into the field, what.50:23Should already be effective in your environment and others and it's gonna be in the sending order with the latest release at the top, so you can scroll down if you want to go back a few days or go back a few releases.50:40You can see over the last couple of months, multiple releases per month of new items, as you can see, things get added capabilities there, support gets added for different firmware, different server versions, different hardware.50:58Capabilities are added. A lot of details and information is available there. Of course since it's on your screen and the text rule, you can certainly initiate the search function.51:19In your browser, and if you want to search for a particular term, it will take you to it and show you that on April second of this year. Well, we did have some releases there that contain the word Splunk and that might be what you're looking for and it allow you to easily find those.51:34Now this is for the most recent, 2026 is the specific year. If you're looking for something you think might be older, you can of course change that to go back a year or two or three or five.51:52If you're searching for something that might help you, if you look and you might be searching because you want to find the help link for it or where the other documentation is around that particular topic. The items in blue in the descriptions there for the actual what's new item.52:09I'm gonna be clickable. They're gonna take you to other places within help or support and those are worth finding and drilling down into. Once you find the year, of course these are also sorted by month. You notice over on the right, we're looking at December, November.52:26October, for that particular year would be you want the most current year, but you think something was released back in January when they 1st started? Here you can go directly to it and see that they added support.52:45Added support, new version of Cisco tools. They added a field notice, and of course those are very valuable information for you to have. Not only does it show up there in the help center.53:03But if you can recall, once you are logged into Intersight, you'll also see field notices here that they're parked at for you to come and review, see your affected device counts, take several options there.53:18You can acknowledge those, e.g., you take them out of this view and simply move them over to the acknowledge tab.53:38Now that we know, the bases for today's subject, where you can find what's new at, again I encourage you to go look at those recordings, go look at those resources. That will save you a lot of time.53:54And even provide you with more information to have in your hand should you need to contact Cisco support you at least be more well informed about it. What we want to do now is look at.54:13But Stephen presented. So we're in intersight. Let me go back here if you haven't seen this before. So we're the login page, intersite.com, with the login.54:32Your single sign on, I'm gonna log into an environment with account administrator privileges, just so I can make sure that I can present everything to you today and nothing is being withheld due to my account privileges.54:48Starting with our back on the left here, we can go under settings and we will look at our users that we have granted access to and of course users.55:07In our groups, into our roles. As I said, I logged into this account in the top right. If I click on the, the head and shoulders icon there, I can see my account and role, so I'm logged into this account or this environment.55:22And the role I have is account administrator. This is where those roles live. You can see the number of those. You want to say which is canned, you know, which maybe customized, as Stephen said, you can customize these.55:38You want to filter those simply left click on filters in the center of the screen, and you'll be able to select either system defined or user defined. And as you can see instantly updates the screen.55:58Between those two. Now since those are blue, again, those are, those are clickable. If you want to drill down, they do have a description field here over to the right.56:16You can enlarge that to suit your viewing pleasure. Otherwise if you want to simply drill down into a particular role, you can read the description there, see some of the timeout settings that have been set for that.56:34The actual privileges there for that. We've got one privilege set for that particular role, and we want to cover the privilege sets here.56:54And see that the privilege sets are actually gonna be more granular than the roles allowing you to create user friendly or user defined privileges.57:12Otherwise known as custom in order to grant precise control user access for objects in your system. On the system to find privileges come, you know, prepackaged with Intersight and are covering the most common.57:30Needs that you have operationally for your team. Now with the user defined or the custom ones, the ones that you want to make up, you can create those privileges to meet, whatever needs you have, whatever team you have.57:47Of course, the things are likely to change, and for an example there we'll go through and we'll create a privilege set. As you can see it's gonna take us through three steps here and we're on the 1st step, the general step.58:06And for the general step, it's got a red asterisk, so that's required. We just want to give it a name, give it a description if that's applicable, that always helps.58:26And now we come to the point of decision do we want to make a custom one or just one that's out of the box? Do you want to select an existing set or or one that's out of the box we can left click there on that blue button select privilege sets.58:42You can see the ones that come pre packaged there and you want to see what they do. We can go through and look at the permissions there for those. As you can see, it is very granular. It is a long list.58:59As Stephen said, there are over 750 privileges able to be accessed and chosen. So it helps to be organized in this. We don't want to use one that's already there. We want to go in and.59:18Be very granular and see everything and only choose what we want. We'll leave it at that, which is the name and click next in the bottom right hand corner, and once we do that.59:36We can see the categories for privileges. In the left there we see we've moved from step one to step two, move from general to select privileged set. And so on the privilege set, we've got those broken down into categories, beginning with configuration and then operate read only support and.59:53System administration. There's an eyeball there you can left click on, that'll give you a little fly out to show your description of that category Once you click through a few of those read only is probably popular.01:00:12And configure has a lot of options there to choose from. Now there's a checkbox I'm gonna make sure you understand, allow future updates as the informational says there, selects any, any new or custom privileges that come out. Maybe after you made this custom.01:00:37Tool set to be included.01:00:57In that, let you go back and modify that or at least review those. There's a link that it provides you there to allow future updates if you want information.01:00:59On exactly that. Otherwise for privilege sets, we do have a link in the description there. Select privileges, we open that in a new tab. We see we've got our SAS help center where we're back up, we've got our privilege sets.01:01:17That a lot of information here about it, some of the actions you can take with those privilege sets clone, edit, delete dependencies, limitations.01:01:33Again, these can be very granular. There's a high number of privileged sets that you can pass on. This is a good place to get started in reviewing that information about privilege sets. Otherwise, when we're back in the actual GUI menu, you see we can expand all of these.01:01:52Columns that we've gotten. We want to not have to drill down and click on those. These are the 750 that Stephen spoke about. Again, they all have.01:02:11Cloud descriptions there. Giving you an idea of what they do, what they control, Lapse all of those. Again, the read only.01:02:27Parts maybe maybe what you're looking for most useful or used to you. Again, know that these can be selected since it's a square box, you can make multiple selections, you don't have to choose everything. There are some that get even more granular if you select the dropdown box.01:02:46These are read only privileges here, IMC access, and the scope that these have, let me use across all the accounts that you have, and I also set it up organizational level.01:03:06Or you Now we can move on and talk about email notifications.01:03:24Stephen said these were baked in from an early stage with intersight, but they have been modified and added to, added to and customized over the years. So there's probably something new about email notifications that.01:03:42That weren't there initially that that if you haven't reviewed them would be new to you as well. We're just going into email notifications. We see what we've already set up and what we can do is create a new notification in the top right.01:03:58Oh Pay attention to the warning there that it's the email notification so it could contain potentially sensitive information to you as far as source names, source types. So be careful.01:04:15When you send these notifications out, make sure you know exactly what's in the notification, exactly where it's going to. I say that because you can create notifications that go to individual email addresses. You can create notifications that go to.01:04:35Distribute distribution list, I'll look up myself. There's my individual one. That's another test email, but if I see something that's not there, keep in mind that I can simply add that.01:04:54So I typed in the email address as not found. I've got the capability there to click on add and add it. We will add that email address, maybe I didn't have that.01:05:21Exactly right.01:05:43Four, and that there we go. So now it's stuck.01:06:05So now we've got a brand new email address that we just added on the fly to the notification. Once we click next, now we can see what notifications we want to receive from those available any categories.01:06:10Categorizes those in two different sections. Alarms. You want to see alarms, of course. You want those, you can see the critical, the warning, informational alarms. Now I would recommend just from guidance around creating these.01:06:25Right off the bat if it's something brand new that you're doing for the very 1st time.01:06:45I wanna make a test email account, test mailbox, test distribution list, and maybe include info. Again, make sure you know exactly what is gonna be sent out in these and who is gonna be sent to to make sure there's nothing there that you consider sensitive?01:06:49You also have the option to include cleared alarms. Now for those under your alarms tab, you can access in the top right. You see there's those that are cleared.01:07:10What it's referring to. And the reason that you might find that useful is that it could give you some visibility as it says here into recently resolved issues and to help you with audits team troubleshooting.01:07:26Or monitoring patterns inside your environment. And if you create conditions, you can do an all or many or filter. Again, like Stephen said, if you want to go in and filter.01:07:43When you get email notifications and once you get email notifications for, you can come in and select a filter here. So i've set up email notification for my environment or the UCS domain equals this.01:07:59Now that's about alarms for the advisories that come out, one of the most important and popular is the EOL advisories end of life. You have products that is engaged and covered by the inter site environment. Once they get end of life, you can receive an advisory.01:08:16Not only would you get a end of life advisory here by going to the top menu item, you would see it pronounced there, but in this method you can also create an email that will come out about end of life.01:08:35You know, software maintenance and let you know about last day of support. I do recommend having those. Both of these you have to enable, they're not enabled by default, but security advisories, of course, utmost importance.01:08:53Field notices, you do want to stay on top of those because they can lead you to actions that you might need to take. And yes, end of life advisories.01:09:10Make sure that everyone that receives those should receive those. Our next topic on the left here under settings, just below email notifications, we got IP access management.01:09:26Now you need account admin access to set this and it's gonna allow you to restrict access to your inter site portal by IP address.01:09:44Or range. Now if we follow the little help link there, pop it open in a new tab, so you've got the capability to manage and allow inter site access.01:10:01Or access to your inter site portal, only from IP addresses that you trust. You must have account admin is not supported on the virtual appliances we talked about before and those.01:10:16Deployment methods, either they're connected or the private, we'll go into this guardian lee.01:10:32Definitely make sure you have a well documented need, you don't want to lock yourself out. In other words, by trying to set up IP access management rules. Our next topic here is suppression rules.01:10:50Steven said, he can suppress notifications about events. Now for us, the most typical use case so far, has been on servers if you're doing server maintenance, whether it's one night, two nights or maybe otherwise.01:11:09Weekend and you want to come in and you're gonna target say these servers here with this particular firmware, it's not all of them, say it's a sub subset, and you want to select those servers square buttons so you can make multiple section selections.01:11:29Make those selections down at the bottom you've got start alarm suppression, you can give it a good description and then start. So manually you've gone in and said, I know we're doing maintenance on these servers.01:11:48It's going to be over the weekend. I don't want to be flooded with emails, it's safe work. They're gonna come back up, be back up at the end of the the weekend, so we don't want to be bothered with the emails. But then you say, oh, well, which ones did I set my alarm suppression on?01:12:04Can't remember or you need to communicate to other team members. In the little widget here at the top, of course these can be minimized or maximized. You scroll over, there is one for alarm suppression. So now we can see of all of our servers, we do have six.01:12:24That are active for alarm suppression. We left click on that, we'll see all of our pressed alarm servers. And here we can identify the ones that we just chose because they have that particular firmware.01:12:43Version 5.4. Manually we can select those again. Left click on the ellipse at the bottom and stop the alarm suppression.01:12:58Now that being said, back to the help section, I do want to demonstrate that you can access it from the question mark here at the top. Help Center, help center.01:13:24And we're back here. We want to navigate back to what's new. As we did before, we have a topic say like Splunk that we want to find out about. Once we spell it right, we can find out where.01:13:35That's it?01:13:55And of course we want to look for the link, what's available for that April second inter site add on. Hop over and now we're down. Notice it moved us down to the resources tab. So if you knew where this was at, you could just.01:13:56Have to click on resources instead of what's new and drill down directly to it over on the right.01:14:16It's already just re let us to where we can see the inter site add on for Splunk. And what we find here, we've got some PDF documents that we can then drill down into. And then we've also got a link to the Splunk based marketplace that might be important for the action you're gonna take.01:14:21You want to come here, it might require login there for the app. This is where you would come to download that. You've already opened your user guide, already opened the release notes.01:14:41So with just a few clicks, even from inside withinside of Intersight, you have located Splunk, open some docs about it, find where you can download it with very little effort.01:14:57So real quick, one last thing, is that if we want to go and take a look at server diagnostics that even covered earlier, quickly find a server, do we want to select this particular server. Again, down at the bottom the ellipses left click on that.01:15:21And you can run diagnostics. I'll end my demo with this. It'll go through the same couple of steps here. General diagnostic details and summary. So in general, it's just gonna confirm, hey, is this particular server that you're gonna run diagnostics on? Here's the model number, here's the serial number.01:15:41Please please please please confirm that this is the actual server. I say that because it's disruptive and we'll see that in a second. So we click next, NO action taken yet, but click next. Now it's on the details, let us give it a name for this particular action so we can search for it.01:16:00And we can do either quick diagnostic or comprehensive diagnostic, the difference will be in the output there. And then we can select the components, either all.01:16:18Or maybe you will want to focus on the storage. Once you click next, now we can click run and that'll do something there. But we're on the summary part. We can again confirm that everything is as it should be. The Actual server, model number.01:16:33Your serial number, current health and the diagnostic type, make sure that's exactly what you want to do. And once we click run there, it's gonna take action, but 1st it's gonna warn us.01:16:53Running diagnostics might interrupt active traffic, reboot the server, and impact your workloads. We can take up to a few hours depending on what you selected, so just heat those warnings around running diagnostics.01:17:11May not be something you want to do during business hours, instead, you might want to do it during the maintenance window. And again, running a test environment on a test server with NO production workloads to make sure it behaves as you expected. I'm just gonna cancel out of this and not run that.01:17:30Because of that warning. And that's all I have for my demo. At this point I'm gonna pass it back to my good friend Riley for the rest of the session. Awesome, thanks so much Joe and Stephen for the informative press.01:17:48Presentation and demo.01:18:08We're gonna wrap things up for us today with a little Q and A and a final Slido question with a survey.01:18:11Oh, we have one more slide of question before our survey is live and is have you heard about intersite's what's new site? This is of course gonna be prior to.01:18:32To Joe and Stephen going over it today.01:18:51Looks like so far we have heard about it, so that's great news. All right I got a couple answers in here. Just for the sake of time, we'll go ahead and cut this one short. We'll go ahead and start our survey, so feel free to spend the next couple of minutes filling that out.01:19:00Now, if you have any questions, please type them in the Q and A.01:19:20Also gonna leave this QR link up for a minute as well. This is going to showcase some of the next EIS sessions that we are going to be hosting. So as you can see today, for 7 July we have what's new with Intersight on 14 July that we'll be going over Splunk integration and then.01:19:25Finally, the 21st is going to be some quick recap and live Q and A.01:19:44All right, before we wrap up here, we have a couple closing slides going over Cisco IQ, where human expertise meets agentic intelligence.01:20:04So some of the benefits here, the key benefits we can see a complete landscape clarity, we have proactive resilience, rapid resolution, and contextualized professional services.01:20:15So you can see it's fairly easy to onboard. These are the steps for existing CX Cloud customers. It's pretty straightforward here. You're simply gonna log in at iQ.cisco.com, into your Cisco credentials or your CCO. You're going to name the account and select what you want to migrate.01:20:34You're gonna create the account and migrate the data. And then after that your migration is complete. So really three simple steps here. We have a couple steps here for new Cisco IQ customers.01:20:52Once again, very simple here. We're gonna create a new Cisco IQ account at IQ.cisco.com. We're gonna create a name and select our primary storage, and then there's gonna be a self guided account configuration wizard that's gonna kind of help us click through the rest of it.01:21:07It's been very simple process here before we go, if you need any help onboarding, please leave your email on the survey and we'll be happy to reach out and provide some one on one assistance.01:21:23For onboarding with Cisco IQ or just any inter site questions in general. Thanks so much for joining everybody. Today's session was what's new with Intersight. Have a good day.01:21:41