Cisco UCS Director has a notification mechanism that enables you to configure emails to be sent to an administrator when specific events occur, such as when a VM is provisioned. In addition, if approvals are required for any task, an email notification can be sent to an administrator or to the group administrator.

Note	You can specify multiple recipients for an email notification. Use a comma as a separator for multiple email addresses.

Cisco UCS Director provides a set of email templates in the HTML format that cover different scenarios. The following are some of the tasks that you can perform with email templates library:

• Add a new email template

• Edit an existing email template—You can edit the subject and message details, or the formatting and presentation fields of an email template. Do not modify any Java-related information in the template.

• Preview an email template—You can preview the email content and determine if the email template needs modification.

• Set an email template as default—You can set email notifications to be sent based on the default email template.

• Delete an email template—You can delete the templates that you have added. However, you cannot delete a template if it meets one of the following criteria:

  • You added a template and set it as a default template.

  • It is a system-provided template.

The license utilization history is displayed for the following resource categories, with timestamp:

• Network Controllers

• Storage Controllers

• Servers

• Server VMs

• Desktop VMs

• Small pods

• Medium pods

Following are the available report categories:

• Resource Name—Name of the available resources associated with Cisco UCS Director.

• Resource Count—Quantity of each available resource.

Application categories are an optional configuration that enable you to define the type of workload for a VM. If you do not use application categories, Cisco UCS Director assumes that all VMs provisioned for your users are generic VMs and configures them to handle CPU-intensive workloads. Whether you choose to use the default application categories or to create your own, you can provide your users with a pre-defined set of workloads that match their application needs.

The workload options for application categories include the following:

• CPU intensive

• Network I/O intensive

• Disk I/O intensive

• Memory intensive

• Any combination of the above

After you create your application categories, you can go to the desired cloud account and assign the vDC policies to the application categories. This assignment determines the boundaries of the infrastructure where the application can be provisioned. You can also use application categories to allocate clusters based on the type of application. For example, Cluster 1 is allocated for Web applications and Cluster 2 is allocated for database applications.

When an application category is chosen by a user, Cisco UCS Director uses the vDC assignment to determine which location, within the boundary of the vDC, best meets the application's workload needs. For example, if the user chooses a CPU-intensive application category, Cisco UCS Director provisions the application in the available infrastructure with the least CPU utilization.

Organizations can customize the End User Portal. The logo, login page, home page, and so on can be customized for branding and user interface-related changes.

You can enable customized menu operations for individual user roles. The menu settings that users can view and access in the application is dependent on the user roles that they have been assigned, and the menu operations that you set for the roles.

The System Tasks screen displays all the system tasks that are currently available in Cisco UCS Director. However, this list of system tasks is linked to the type of accounts that you have created in Cisco UCS Director. For example, if you have logged in for the first time, then only a set of general system-related tasks or VMware related tasks are visible on this page. When you add accounts, such as rack accounts or Cisco UCS Manager accounts, system tasks related to these accounts are populated on this page.

Following are the tasks that you can complete from the System Tasks screen:

• View the available systems tasks—You can use the Expand and Collapse options to view all the system tasks that are available on this page. The tasks are categorized according to the accounts available in Cisco UCS Director. For example: Cisco UCS Tasks or NetApp Tasks.

• Disable and enable system tasks—In circumstances when there are multiple processes or tasks running on the appliance, you can choose to disable a system task. If you do so, then until such time that you manually enable it, the system task will not run. This will affect the data populated in other reports. For example, if you disable an inventory collection system task, then reports that require this data may not display accurate data. In this case, you will have to manually run an inventory collection process, or enable the system task.

  For more information, see Disabling or Enabling a System Task.

In a single-node setup, where there is only one server, all system tasks run on this server. In a multi-node setup, where there are multiple servers configured, all system tasks run on the primary server by default. However, you can specify system tasks to run on the secondary servers. Following are the recommended steps to perform this task:

1. Ensure that the secondary servers are available in Cisco UCS Director as nodes. If the servers are not available, then you must add the servers as nodes. See Creating a Service Node.

2. Create a node pool from the available servers. See Creating a Node Pool.

3. Create a system task policy, and associate it with a node policy. See Creating a System Task Policy.

4. Associate a node pool with the system task policy. See Assigning a Node Pool to a System Task Policy.

5. Select a system task, and associate it with a system-task policy. See Assigning a System Policy to a System Task.

Cisco UCS Director supports customization and management of catalog icons, action-related icons, and status-related icons. Each icon set in the system contains several images that are available by default. You can change the icons that are displayed for either the catalogs, actions or status. You can either upload a new image and set it as the icon, or you can choose a different icon from the set of system-provided icons

Following are the pre-populated icon sets in Cisco UCS Director:

• Standard Catalog Icon Set

• Status Icon Set

• Bare Metal Catalog Icon Set

• Advanced Catalog Icon Set

• Container Catalog Icon Set

• Catalog Folder Icon Set

• Action Icon Set

In addition to modifying an icon in the user interface, you can also revert to the default icon.

Tagging is when you assign a label to an object. As an administrator, you can decide to tag objects such as resource groups and user groups, in Cisco UCS Director. You can assign tags to a category such as Compute, Storage, Network, and Virtual. You can also apply a tag to a specific type of account in the selected category. For information on how to apply and remove tags on resource groups, see the Managing Tags of a Resource Group section in the Cisco UCS Director APIC Management Guide.

Once the tag is created, based on the defined applicability rules, the tags are filtered and displayed in an object report. You can associate the tag to an object such as resource group. To view the resource entities that are associated with a tag, choose the tag and click View Details. Alternatively, you can double click the tag.

Note	If resource entity is not associated with the tag, the table is empty.

Database audit logging lets the system record information on login events and query events. These events are logged in the /var/lib/mysql/data/audit.log file. By default, database audit logging is disabled. To enable database audit logging, use the dbAuditLog.sh command. For more information, see Enabling Audit Logging.

Note	You can disable database audit logging if the system encounters performance issues due to a heavy audit log output.