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This chapter contains the following sections:
Cisco UCS Director is a complete, highly secure, end-to-end management, orchestration, and automation solution for a wide array of Cisco and non-Cisco data infrastructure components, and for the industry's leading converged infrastructure solutions based on the Cisco UCS and Cisco Nexus platforms. For a complete list of supported infrastructure components and solutions, see the Cisco UCS Director Compatibility Matrix.
Cisco UCS Director is a 64-bit appliance that uses the following standard templates:
Cisco UCS Director extends the unification of computing and network layers through Cisco UCS to provide you with comprehensive visibility and management of your data center infrastructure components. You can use Cisco UCS Director to configure, administer, and monitor supported Cisco and non-Cisco components. The tasks you can perform include the following:
Create, clone, and deploy service profiles and templates for all Cisco UCS servers and compute applications.
Monitor organizational usage, trends, and capacity across a converged infrastructure on a continuous basis. For example, you can view heat maps that show virtual machine (VM) utilization across all your data centers.
Deploy and add capacity to converged infrastructures in a consistent, repeatable manner.
Manage, monitor, and report on data center components, such as Cisco UCS domains or Cisco Nexus network devices.
Extend virtual service catalogs to include services for your physical infrastructure.
Manage secure multi-tenant environments to accommodate virtualized workloads that run with non-virtualized workloads.
Cisco UCS Director enables you to build workflows that provide automation services, and to publish the workflows and extend their services to your users on demand. You can collaborate with other experts in your company to quickly and easily create policies. You can build Cisco UCS Director workflows to automate simple or complex provisioning and configuration processes.
Once built and validated, these workflows perform the same way every time, no matter who runs the workflows. An experienced data center administrator can run them, or you can implement role-based access control to enable your users and customers to run the workflows on a self-service, as needed, basis.
With Cisco UCS Director, you can automate a wide array of tasks and use cases across a wide variety of supported Cisco and non-Cisco hardware and software data center components. A few examples of the use cases that you can automate include, but are not limited to:
VM provisioning and lifecycle management
Network resource configuration and lifecycle management
Storage resource configuration and lifecycle management
Tenant onboarding and infrastructure configuration
Application infrastructure provisioning
Self-service catalogs and VM provisioning
Bare metal server provisioning, including installation of an operating system
Hewlett-Packard (HP) Onboard Administrator (OA) is the enclosure management processor, subsystem, and firmware base that supports the HP BladeSystem c-Class enclosure and all the managed devices that are contained within the enclosure. Using OA, you can perform the basic management tasks on server blades or switches within the enclosure.
Note | From Cisco UCS Director Release 5.2 and later releases, Cisco UCS Director offers support for the HP OA version 4.3. |
Cisco UCS Director communicates with HP OA through secure shell (SSH) to manage HP c7000 servers. At one time, you can manage up to eight servers. To manage servers, you must have two HP OAs in an enclosure: one HP OA in the active state and the other HP OA in the standby state.
With Cisco UCS Director, you can perform the following tasks on an HP server:
The following table provides the mapping between the HP OA buttons and Cisco UCS Director actions.
HP OA Button | Cisco UCS Director Action | Description | ||
---|---|---|---|---|
Momentary Press |
Power on and Power off (the Force check box needs to be unchecked)
|
Mimics a physical momentary press of the power button on the server blade. This action powers the server blade on or off. For more information about managing the blade power, see Managing the Power in a Blade. |
||
Press and Hold |
Power off (the Force check box needs to be checked) |
Mimics a physical press and hold of the power button on the server blade. This action forces the server blade to shut power off without shutting down the OS before turning the power off. This option is not available when the server blade is off. For more information about managing the blade power, see Managing the Power in a Blade. |
||
Cold Boot |
Reboot (the Force check box needs to be checked) |
Removes power from the system immediately. This action is not available when the server blade is off. For more information, see Rebooting a Blade Server. |
||
Reset |
Reboot (the Force check box needs to be unchecked) |
Resets the system. This action is not available when the server blade is off. |