Introducing Cisco UCS Central 1.3

This chapter includes the following sections:

Overview of Cisco UCS Central 1.3 Features

Cisco UCS Central, release 1.3 allows you to take charge of the data center environment by delivering easy to use, integrated solution for managing Cisco UCS Domains from a single management point, both in data centers and remote management locations, with high availability. With Cisco UCS Central 1.3, you can efficiently manage server, storage and network policies and generate network traffic reports for your entire data center.

This release also introduces a new re-architected HTML5 based user interface. The following table lists major new features and functions in this release:

Feature Functions

KVM Hypervisor

Ability to install Cisco UCS Central in KVM Hypervisor.

Scheduled backup

Ability to schedule domain backup time. Provides you flexibility to schedule different backup times for different domain groups.

NFS Shared storage

Support for NFS instead of RDM for the shared storage is required for Cisco UCS Central cluster installation for high availability.

Domain specific ID pools

The domain specific ID pools are now available to global service profiles.

vLAN consumption for Local Service Profiles

Ability to push vLANs to the UCS Manager instance through Cisco UCS Central CLI only without having to deploy a service profile that pulls the vLANs.

M-Series Servers

Pre-enabled support for Cisco M-Series Servers.

Other enhancements

  • Connecting to SQL server that uses dynamic port.

  • Support for SQL 2014 database and Oracle 12c Database.

Overview of Cisco UCS Central HTML 5 UI

Cisco UCS Central HTML5 based user interface provides flexibility and task based usability for your management purposes.

The dashboard provides a quick overview of components in the system. You can pin the components you use frequently and customize the dashboard to suit your operational requirements. You can click on any object on the dashboard to go to the related page in the system. Click Play on this Video to view a brief introduction to the HTML 5 UI.

Using the HTML5 UI

Dashboard

You can pin dashboard widgets and customize the dashboard based on your operational requirements. The following is the basic dashboard structure:





Item

Description

1

Search bar. What are you looking for?. You can do the following:

  • Select the entity type to search for any entity in the system by name. Empty search string returns all entities.

  • Filter search results by location and status when applicable.

  • Click on an entity in the search results to open the details in a new page.

2

Actions bar. What do you want to do?. You can Create, Schedule, Install, Export and Import from here:

  • Click drop down to display available actions and select a task or type the task in the field and launch the dialog box and perform the task.

3

Dashboard widget. You can pin any widget on this dashboard. When you mouse over on the widget, other options are enabled on widget's menu bar.

4

From within any widget on the dashboard, when you display additional options, you can do the following:

  • Refresh the displayed information for this specific widget.

  • Unpin this widget from the dashboard.

  • Launch the details page for this operation.

Navigation Icons

The following navigation icons help you navigate around the product to perform management tasks:





Item

Description

1

Search icon. Click to display physical and logical inventory related entities in the system such as, Domains, Fabric Interconnects, Servers, Chassis, FEX, vLANs, vSANs, Service Profiles, Templates, Pools, Policies and ID Universe. Click on any of these entities to launch related page and view details.

2

Organization icon. Click to display org root and other sub organizations in the system. You can click on the root or any sub org to launch the details page for a selected org.

3

Domain group icon. Click to display domain group root and other domain groups in the system. You can click on a domain group to launch the details page.

4

User Preferences icon. Click to launch User Settings. From here you can Change Password, Restore Dashboard Defaults, and Show First Launch Experience.

5

Alerts icon. Click to display and navigate to Pending Activities, System Faults, Domain Faults, Events, Audit Logs, Core Dumps, Sessions and Internal Services.

6

Operations icon. Click to display and navigate to Firmware, Backup & Restore, Export & Import, Licenses and Tech Support.

7

System Settings icon. Click to display and navigate to System Profiles, System Policies, Users, Authentication and SNMP.

8

Log out icon. Click to log out from the active UCS Central session.

9

Refresh icon. Click to Refresh information in all pinned widgets. Each widget has individual refresh icons to refresh data for individual widgets.

10

Dashboard widgets library icon. Click to view available widgets and click on the widget to pin it to the dashboard.

Behavior and Design Changes in HTML5 UI

Feature Support

The following features that are available in the current UI are not supported in the HTML5 UI at this time:

  • Policy Import

  • Threshold Policy

  • Statistics

Behavior Changes Based on Design

  • You can only create global service profiles using an initial or updating template that uses LAN or SAN connectivity policy. You must create the global service profile template before you can create a service profile.

  • The following inline options are not available in a service profile:

    • Manual vNIC

    • iSCSI

    • vHBA

    • Boot Policy

    • Static ID

    If you have an existing global service profile with any of these options, you cannot edit the global service profile in the HTML5 UI.

  • Any changes to the iSCSI boot parameters made in HTML5 UI will not be available in the Flex UI.

  • You can use vNIC templates only in a LAN connectivity policy.

  • You can use vHBA templates only in a SAN connectivity policy.

  • vNIC and vHBA Placement is now referred to as Interface Placement.

  • Registration Policy is now referred to as Domain Group Qualification Policy.

  • ID Range Qualification Policy is now referred to as ID Range Access Control Policy.

  • There are no qualified IP addresses for ID Range Access Control Policy.

  • You can create server pool policies when creating a server pool. Select Server Pool Qualification Policies to create these policies. When assigning server pools, additional server pool qualification is not supported in the global service profile.

  • The only backup option is config-all backup. Other backup types such as config logical and config system are not supported.

  • Local service profile picks up Host Firmware Policy from the Org instead of the Domain Group.

  • When Import fails in HTML 5 UI, the message displays the reason for import failure. Make sure to correct errors and resubmit the configuration for import.

  • Local service profile inventory is not displayed.

  • The maintenance policy and schedules that are currently used by local service porfiles and currently under domain groups will not be available in HTML5 UI.

Multi-version Management Support

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.

Supported Features in Cisco UCS Manager

You can view supported features in a Cisco UCS domain using the Cisco UCS Central CLI. Based on the Cisco UCS Manager versions in the registered Cisco UCS domains, Cisco UCS Central CLI builds list of supported features in the following four categories:

  • Server Feature Mask: Includes global service profiles, policy mapping and Inband management, advanced boot order

  • Network Feature Mask: None

  • Storage Feature Mask: FC Zoning and ISCSI IPv6

  • Environment Feature Mask: Power group, remote operations, UCS registration, estimate impact on reconnect

Management Exclusion

Multi-version support also provides you the ability to exclude some features from global management. You can log into a registered UCS domain and turn off a specific feature from Cisco UCS Manager CLI. You can disable the following global management capabilities:

  • Global service profile deployment: If you deploy global service profile on a server pool, and you have disabled global service profile deployment in one of the servers in the pool, Cisco UCS Central excludes the server from the global service profile deployment.

  • In band management: A service profile with inband management capability will not be deployed on the servers where you have excluded inband management feature.

  • Policy mapping: This will disable importing policies or policy components from this Cisco UCS domain into Cisco UCS Central.

  • Remote management: This will restrain controlling physical devices in a Cisco UCS domain from Cisco UCS Central.

You can enable these features any time using the Cisco UCS Manager CLI to restore global management capabilities in the registered Cisco UCS domains at anytime.

Feature Support Matrix

The following table provides a list of features in Cisco UCS Central, and Cisco UCS Manager release versions in which these features are supported:

Cisco UCS Central Features

Supported Cisco UCS Central Versions

Supported Cisco UCS Manager Versions

2.1(2a)/2.1(3x)

2.2(1x)

2.2(2x)/2.2(3x)

3.0(1x)

Multi-version management support and viewing supported Cisco UCS Manager features

1.1(2a)

No

Yes

Yes

Yes

Importing policy/policy component and resources

No

Yes

Yes

Yes

Specifying remote location for backup image files

No

No

Yes

Yes

3rd party certificate

No

No

Yes

Yes

IPv6 inband management support

No

No

Yes

Yes

Estimate Impact on Reconnect

1.2(1a)

No

No

Yes

Note   

Only supported from 2.2(3x)

Yes

Precision Boot Order Control

No

Yes

Yes

Yes

Scriptable vMedia

1.2(1e) and later

No

No

Yes

Note   

Supported only in 2.2(2c) and later 2.2(x) releases

No

Note   

Supported in 3.0(2) and later


Note

  • Searching for policy/policy components or resources is supported in Cisco UCS Manager, releases 2.1(2x) and 2.1(3x). To import policies, you must have Cisco UCS Manager, releases 2.2(1b) or higher.

  • For precision boot order control, the blade server must have CIMC version 2.2(1b) or above.