Cisco UCS Central simplifies
Cisco UCS management. From a single
Cisco UCS domain to multiple
Cisco UCS domains,
Cisco UCS Central delivers standardization, aggregation, global policy enforcement,
and global ID consistency.
While
Cisco UCS Manager provides policy-driven management for a single
Cisco UCS domain,
Cisco UCS Central manages and monitors domain activity globally. These capabilities
extend across multiple
Cisco UCS Manager domains worldwide, providing an even greater degree of
administrative power, operational efficiency, and policy-driven automation.
Cisco UCS Central supports scaling to and managing of 10,000 servers. This
represents approximately 70 to125
Cisco UCS Manager domains, depending on domain size. Cisco tested
Cisco UCS Central rigorously with more than 200
Cisco UCS domains and more than 6000 service profiles.
The setup architecture
of UCS Central is flexible. It allows you to manage your registered UCS domain,
and the number and geographic dispersion of those domains. Some principles
apply throughout the different architectures, while others are more pertinent
for a specific size.
It is important to
plan for growth and envision the eventual size and scope of a UCS deployment
when implementing
Cisco UCS Central. An organization could start with a few UCS domains, but then
dramatically scale over a period of 1-3 years. Even if you do not expect
significant growth, it is always best to build and plan for future management.
Also, consider whether
the environment is Brownfield or Greenfield.
Greenfield
A Greenfield
environment is one in which
Cisco UCS Central only contains objects that were created through
Cisco UCS Central. Therefore, these objects are global in scope. Only a
Cisco UCS Central Administrator can add, modify, or delete these objects from
Cisco UCS Central. A
Cisco UCS Manager
Administrator cannot change them.
Cisco UCS Central maintains read and write ownership of all global objects.
When you deploy global service profiles from
Cisco UCS Central to a blade server in a UCS domain, a shadow copy of the global
service profile deploys to
Cisco UCS Manager.
In
Cisco UCS Manager,
in the Server, LAN, and SAN tabs, the global policies, VLANs, VSANs, vNIC/vHBA
templates, and global service profiles display with the global icon. This
indicates that they are global and therefore, controlled by
Cisco UCS Central. Global service profile templates do not copy-down to
Cisco UCS Manager.