Introducing Cisco UCS Central
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:
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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.
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Centralized, policy-based firmware upgrades that can be applied globally or selectively through automated schedules or as business workloads demand
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Global ID pooling to eliminate identifier conflicts
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Global administrative policies that enable both global and local management of the Cisco UCS domains
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An XML API, building on the Cisco UCS Manager XML API for easy integration into higher-level data center management frameworks
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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 Features
The following table provides a list of features with brief description on the management capabilities of Cisco UCS Central:
 Note |
For a full list of new features, see the Release Notes for Cisco UCS Central. |
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Feature |
Description |
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Centralized inventory |
Cisco UCS Central automatically aggregates a global inventory of all registered Cisco UCS components, organized by domain, with customizable refresh schedules and provides even easier integration with ITIL processes, with direct access to the inventory through an XML interface. |
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Centralized fault summary |
Cisco UCS Central enables you to view the status of all Cisco UCS infrastructure on the global fault summary panel, with a fault summary organized by domain and fault type. Also provides you the ability to view individual Cisco UCS Manager domains for greater fault detail and more rapid problem resolution. Drilling down on a fault launches the UCS Manager in context for a seamlessly integrated experience. |
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Centralized, policy-based firmware upgrades |
You can download firmware updates automatically from the Cisco.com to a firmware library within Cisco UCS Central. Then schedule automated firmware updates, globally or selectively, based on your business requirements. Managing firmware centrally ensures compliance with IT standards and makes reprovisioning of resources a point-and-click operation. |
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Global ID pools |
Cisco UCS Central eliminates identifier conflicts and ensures portability of software licenses. You are able to centralize the sourcing of all IDs, such as universal user IDs (UUIDs), MAC addresses, IP addresses, and worldwide names (WWNs), from global pools and gain real-time ID use summaries. Centralizing server identifier information makes it simple to move a server identifier between Cisco UCS domains anywhere in the world and reboot an existing workload to run on the new server. |
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Domain groups |
Cisco UCS Central simplifies policy management by providing options to create domain groups and subgroups. A domain group is an arbitrary grouping of Cisco UCS domains that can be used to group systems into geographical or organizational groups. Each domain group can have up to five levels of domain sub groups. This provides you the ability to manage policy exceptions when administering large numbers of Cisco UCS domains. Each sub group has a hierarchical relationship with the parent domain group. |
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Global administrative policies |
Cisco UCS Central helps you to ensure compliance and staff efficiency with global administrative policies. The global policies are defined at the domain group level and can manage anything in the infrastructure, from date and time and user authentication to equipment power and system event log (SEL) policies. |
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Global service profiles and templates |
Global service profiles and templates in Cisco UCS Central enables fast and simplified infrastructure deployment and provides consistency of configurations throughout the enterprise. This feature enables global bare-metal workload mobility very similar to how hypervisor enables virtualized workload mobility. |
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Backup |
Cisco UCS Central provides an automatic backup facility that enables quick and efficient backing up the configuration information of the registered Cisco UCS domains and the UCS Central configuration. |
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XML API |
Cisco UCS Central, just like Cisco UCS Manager, has a high-level industry-standard XML API for interfacing with existing management frameworks and orchestration tools. The XML API for Cisco UCS Central Software is similar to the XML API for Cisco UCS Manager, making integration with high-level managers very fast. |
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Remote Management |
Cisco UCS Central enables you to manage various end points in the registered Cisco UCS domains from one management point. You can manage chassis, servers, fabric interconnects, and fabric extenders from Cisco UCS Central GUI or CLI. You can also access tech support files for registered UCS domains from Cisco UCS Central. |
Overview of Cisco UCS Central 2.0 Features
Cisco UCS Central 2.0 supports new features listed in the sections in this topic. Some of these features are built in Cisco UCS Central to be compatible with Cisco UCS Manager release 3.1(3) and later. For more information about the appropriate supported Cisco UCS Manager releases, see the feature support matrix in the Cisco UCS Central Release Notes.
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Feature |
Function |
|---|---|
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Support for IOE Controller |
Supports a second RAID Controller in the IO Expander on Cisco UCS S3260 Storage Server (UCS-C3K-M4RAID). |
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Support for HBA Controller |
Supports Dual HBA Controllers on Cisco UCS S3260 Storage Server (UCS-S3260-DHBA). |
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BIOS Asset Tag |
Service profiles now display an Asset Tag to uniquely identify servers. |
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Globalization of Service Profiles |
Allows you to globalize Local Service Profiles from Cisco UCS Manager intoCisco UCS Central to deploy and use Cisco UCS Central in a legacy software environment. |
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Integrated Server Diagnostics |
Enables you to verify the health of hardware components on your servers and provides various tests to stress and exercise the hardware subsystems, such as memory and CPU, on the servers. |
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Lightweight Upgrades/ Hot Patching |
Delivers Cisco UCS Manager firmware security updates for infrastructure and server components through service pack bundles. |
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Set KVM IP on Physical servers |
Allows you to configure KVM IP s on physical servers for Inband and Outband management. |
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SED Management, KMIP Support |
Introduces security policies for Self-Encrypting Drives (SEDs) for management of data encryption. The security keys required to encrypt the media encryption key can be configured locally, or remotely using the KMIP server. |
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Smart SSD |
Supports monitoring SSD health and provides statistics about various SSD properties, and a threshold limit for each property. |
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User-defined FC Zoning |
Allows you to create an FC Zone profile to group all zoning needs for a VM to represent a single data replication solution between storage arrays. |
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Fabric Evacuation in Firmware Auto Install |
Supports automatic configuration of Fabric Evacuation during an FI upgrade and reboot during AutoInstall, and ensures that the appropriate failover settings are configured for the firmware upgrade. |
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Launch HTML5 KVM Client |
Launches the HTML5 based KVM client directly from the Cisco UCS Central GUI. |
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New Policies |
The following new policies are introduced in Cisco UCS Central 2.0:
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Server Reboot Log |
Displays a server reboot log with the last five reasons for the reset, along with the time and source of power transition. |
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Cisco UCS Manager DirectView tabs |
Launches DirectView of Cisco UCS Manager Server Statistics tabs from 2.0 to view details of CIMC Sessions, System Event Logs, VIF paths, Statistics, Temperatures, Power, and Installed Firmware. |
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UI enhancements |
Introduces the following UI enhancements:
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Cisco UCS Central CLI Release 2.0 Features
The following table provides a list of features with a brief description on the command-line (CLI) capabilities of Cisco UCS Central:
Note |
For a full list of new features, see the Release Notes for Cisco UCS Central. |
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Feature |
Description |
|---|---|
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Set KVM IP on Physical servers |
Allows you to configure KVM IP s on physical servers for Inband and Outband management. |
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SED Management, KMIP Support |
Introduces security policies for Self-Encrypting Drives (SEDs) for management of data encryption. The security keys required to encrypt the media encryption key can be configured locally, or remotely using the KMIP server. |
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Smart SSD |
Supports monitoring SSD health and provides statistics about various SSD properties, and a threshold limit for each property. |
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User-defined FC Zoning |
Allows you to create an FC Zone profile to group all zoning needs for a VM to represent a single data replication solution between storage arrays. |
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Fabric Evacuation in Firmware Auto Install |
Supports automatic configuration of Fabric Evacuation during an FI upgrade and reboot during AutoInstall, and ensures that the appropriate failover settings are configured for the firmware upgrade. |
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New Policies |
The following new policies are introduced in Cisco UCS Central 2.0:
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