Cisco UCS Central provides scalable management solution for growing Cisco UCS environment. Cisco UCS Central simplifies the management of multiple Cisco UCS domains from a single management point through standardization, global policies and global ID pools. Cisco UCS Central does not replace Cisco UCS Manager, which is the policy driven management for single UCS domain. Instead Cisco UCS Central focuses on managing and monitoring the UCS domains on a global level, across multiple individual Cisco UCS Classic and Mini management domains worldwide.

Cisco UCS Central enables you to manage individual or groups of classic, mini or mixed Cisco UCS domains with the following:

• Centralized Inventory of all Cisco UCS components for a definitive view of the entire infrastructure and simplified integration with current Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) processes.

• Centralized, policy-based firmware upgrades that can be applied globally or selectively through automated schedules or as business workloads demand

• Global ID pooling to eliminate identifier conflicts

• Global administrative policies that enable both global and local management of the Cisco UCS domains

• An XML API, building on the Cisco UCS Manager XML API for easy integration into higher-level data center management frameworks

• Bandwidth statistics collection and aggregation with two week or one year retention

• Remote management to manage various end points in registered Cisco UCS domains

Cisco UCS Central does not reduce or change any local management capabilities of Cisco UCS Manager, such as its API. This allows you to continue usingCisco UCS Manager the same way as when you did not have Cisco UCS Central, and also allows all existing third party integrations to continue to operate without change.

Cisco UCS Central creates a hierarchy of Cisco UCS domain groups for managing multiple Cisco UCS domains. You will have the following categories of domain groups in Cisco UCS Central:

• Domain Group — A group that contains multiple Cisco UCS domains. You can group similar Cisco UCS domains under one domain group for simpler management.

• Ungrouped Domains — When a new Cisco UCS domain is registered in Cisco UCS Central, it is added to the ungrouped domains. You can assign the ungrouped domain to any domain group.

If you have created a domain group policy, and a new registered Cisco UCS domain meets the qualifiers defined in the policy, it will automatically be placed under the domain group specified in the policy. If not, it will be placed in the ungrouped domains category. You can assign this ungrouped domain to a domain group.

Each Cisco UCS domain can only be assigned to one domain group. You can assign or reassign membership of the Cisco UCS domains at any time. When you assign a Cisco UCS domain to a domain group, the Cisco UCS domain will automatically inherit all management policies specified for the domain group.

Before adding a Cisco UCS domain to a domain group, make sure to change the policy resolution controls to local in the Cisco UCS domain. This will avoid accidentally overwriting service profiles and maintenance policies specific to that Cisco UCS domain. Even when you have enabled auto discovery for the Cisco UCS domains, enabling local policy resolution will protect the Cisco UCS domain from accidentally overwriting policies.

Cisco UCS Central acts as a global policy server for registered Cisco UCS domains. Configuring global Cisco UCS Central policies for remote Cisco UCS domains involves registering domains and assigning registered domains to domain groups.

In addition, the policy import capability allows a local policy to be globalized inside of Cisco UCS Central. You can then apply these global policies to other registered Cisco UCS domains.

You can define global policies in Cisco UCS Central that are resolved by Cisco UCS Manager in a registered Cisco UCS domain.

Cisco UCS Central, release 1.1(2a) and newer provides you the ability to manage multiple Cisco UCS domains with different versions of Cisco UCS Manager at the same time. Cisco UCS Central identifies feature capabilities of each Cisco UCS domain at the time of domain registration. This ability enables you to seamlessly integrate multiple versions Cisco UCS Manager with Cisco UCS Central for management and global service profile deployment.

When you upgrade your Cisco UCS Central to a newer release, based on the features you are using, you might not have to upgrade all of your Cisco UCS Manager release versions to make sure the registered UCS domains are compatible with Cisco UCS Central.

When you register a Cisco UCS domain in Cisco UCS Central, along with the inventory information Cisco UCS Central receives the following information from the domain:

• Cisco UCS Manager release version

• List of available supported features in the domain

The available features are sent as a management capability matrix to Cisco UCS Central. Based on this information Cisco UCS Central builds a list of supported features for each registered domain. Based on the feature capabilities in a Cisco UCS domain, Cisco UCS Central decides if certain global management options are possible in the domain. When you perform management tasks, such as deploying a global service profile on a group of domains that include earlier versions of Cisco UCS Manager instances, based on the feature capability matrix, Cisco UCS Central does the following:

• Delivers the task only to the supported domains.

• Displays a version incompatibility message for the domains where the feature is not supported.

Cisco UCS uses a managed object model, where managed objects are abstract representations of physical or logical entities that can be managed. For example, servers, chassis, I/O cards, and processors are physical entities represented as managed objects, and resource pools, user roles, service profiles, and policies are logical entities represented as managed objects.

Managed objects may have one or more associated properties that can be configured.

You can use the scope command with any managed object, whether a permanent object or a user-instantiated object. The other commands allow you to create and manage user-instantiated objects. For every create object command, a corresponding delete object and enter object command exists.

You can use the Tab key in any mode to complete a command. Partially typing a command name and pressing Tab causes the command to be displayed in full or to the point where another keyword must be chosen or an argument value must be entered.

The CLI stores all commands used in the current session. You can step through the previously used commands by using the Up Arrow or Down Arrow keys. The Up Arrow key steps to the previous command in the history, and the Down Arrow key steps to the next command in the history. If you get to the end of the history, pressing the Down Arrow key does nothing.

All commands in the history can be entered again by simply stepping through the history to recall the desired command and pressing Enter. The command is entered as if you had manually typed it. You can also recall a command and change it before you press Enter.

When you enter a configuration command in the CLI, the command is not applied until you enter the commit-buffer command. Until committed, a configuration command is pending and can be discarded by entering a discard-buffer command.

You can accumulate pending changes in multiple command modes and apply them together with a single commit-buffer command. You can view the pending commands by entering the show configuration pending command in any command mode.

Note	Committing multiple commands together is not an atomic operation. If any command fails, the successful commands are applied despite the failure. Failed commands are reported in an error message.

While any commands are pending, an asterisk (*) appears before the command prompt. The asterisk disappears when you enter the commit-buffer command.

The following example shows how the prompts change during the command entry process:

UCSC# connect policy-mgr
UCSC(policy-mgr)# scope domain-group
UCSC(policy-mgr) /domain-group # create domain-group 12
UCSC(policy-mgr) /domain-group* # commit-buffer
UCSC(policy-mgr) /domain-group # 

Cisco UCS Central supports an identifier policy for the root domain group. The identifier policy defines the soak interval, which is the number of seconds Cisco UCS Central waits before reassigning a pool entity that has been released by the Cisco UCS domain to which it was assigned.