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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 networking 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 basis, as needed.
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
The features and benefits of Cisco UCS Director are as follows:
The Cisco UCS Director Red Hat Enterprise (RHEV) VM Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) Connector is a full virtualization solution for Linux on AMD64 and Intel 64 hardware. KVM is a Linux kernel module created for the standard Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 kernel.
The Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Manager can be managed by Cisco UCS Director through the Representational State Transfer (REST) API.
Note | Cisco UCS Director recognizes Red Hat Enterprise Virtual Machine (VM), Red Hat Enterprise Virtual Hypervisor Hosts, and Red Hat Enterprise Linux Hosts for additional functionality. |
The minimum system requirements depend upon how many VMs you plan to manage.
Note | For optimal performance, reserve additional CPU and memory resources. |
For information about minimum system requirements for a multi-node setup, see the Cisco UCS Director Multi-Node Installation and Configuration Guide.
If you plan to manage up to 2000 VMs, the Cisco UCS Director environment must meet at least the minimum system requirements in the following table.
Element | Minimum Supported Requirement |
---|---|
vCPU |
4 |
Memory |
8 GB |
Hard Disk |
100 GB |
Cisco UCS Director Orchestrator allows you to organize workflows so that you can automate simple or complex actions on your infrastructure (either physical or virtual). By using Orchestrator you can organize tasks into distinct workflows to accomplish specific IT services, such as adding VMs. You can then add multiple tasks to a workflow is accomplished using the workflow UI designer. Triggers help initiate actions inside a workflow. You can execute the workflow directory or have a trigger begin the process. A typical workflow consists of the following elements:
The simplest workflow consists of two connected tasks. A task represents a particular action or operation. The workflow determines the order in which your tasks are executed by Orchestrator. When constructing workflows, by dragging-and-dropping tasks, it is possible to route the output of one workflow into the input of another workflow. This connecting of multiple tasks is how you create more complex workflows.
Cisco UCS Director includes several workflows tasks to aid in the construction of RHEV KVM-specific workflows using Workflow Designer. The following available workflow tasks are:
You use the workflow designer to implement actions or to select tasks from a list and then drag and drop them onto your Workflow Designer pane.
Cisco UCS Director in conjunction with the Cisco UCS Director Baremetal Agent supports all types of Linux and Microsoft Windows operating systems in baremetal provisioning workflows. Certain operating systems are packaged out-of-the-box with the Cisco UCS Director Baremetal Agent. However, additional operating systems can be added as necessary. Any operating system that supports PXE boot and/or install is supported and can be leveraged in baremetal provisioning workflows.
RHEV KVM supports Microsoft Windows 2008/2012 provisioning.