Management through Cisco UCS Director

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.

Automation and Orchestration with Cisco UCS Director

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