Overview

This chapter contains the following sections:

Cisco UCS Director Orchestrator

The Cisco UCS Director Orchestrator (also called the Cisco UCS Director Orchestration Engine, or just Orchestration) enables IT administrators to automate cloud deployment and provisioning and to standardize IT services.

At the scale of cloud computing, manually performing actions such as creating VMs and provisioning networks is prohibitively time-consuming. In Cisco UCS Director, these actions, or tasks, are executable elements that can be run from the GUI. Cisco UCS Director Orchestrator further automates these complex tasks by organizing them into workflows.

Orchestrator works by executing a series of scripted actions called tasks. Each task performs one action. By connecting tasks so that the input of one task is the output of a previous task, you build up a workflow to automate administrative processes such as creating VMs, provisioning bare metal servers, setting up storage, compute, and network resources, and many others.

Going Further

The following documentation describes how to go further with Cisco UCS Director Orchestrator by using advanced scripting capabilities not covered in this basic guide to Orchestration.

For a description of scripting technologies available in Cisco UCS Director and help choosing the right solution for your application, see the Cisco UCS Director API Customization and Integration Guide.
For an introduction to developing custom tasks, see the Cisco UCS Director Custom Task Getting Started Guide.
For examples of scripts that can be used to customize tasks, see the Cisco UCS Director CloupiaScript Cookbook.

For more information about installing, configuring, and administering Cisco UCS Director, see the guides available at the Cisco UCS Director Product Support Home website.

Common Icons

The following table provides information about the common icons used in the user interface. You can see the name of an icon when you hover over it with your mouse. Some icons may have a different name, depending upon the context in which they're used.

Icon

Name

Description

Search is available on the header and on individual screens. Click Search on the header to find a report in the user interface. Click Search on an individual screen to find one or more items in the report.

Alert

Alert is available on the header. Click Alert to view your diagnostic system messages.

User

User is available on the header. Click User to access your profile, or to log out of the user interface.

Export

Export is available on individual screens. Click Export to export the content of the report that is visible on the screen.

Import

Import is available on individual screens. Click Import to import a file.

Refresh

Refresh is available on individual screens. Click Refresh to refresh the data that is visible on the screen.

View Details

View Details is available on individual screens. Click View Details to see details about the selected row in the table.

Table View

Table view is available for your application containers and catalogs. Click Table View to view your application containers or catalogs in a table with details about each application container or catalog displayed.

Tile View

Tile view is available for your catalogs and application containers. Tile View to view your catalogs and application containers in a tiled view of icons. With this view, you must click on an icon to see details about that catalog item or application container.

Create

Create is available on individual screens. Click Create to create a new object, such as a VM disk.

Add

Add is available on individual screens. Click Add to add an item to an existing object, such as adding a catalog item to an existing catalog folder. The name of this icon may also include the item that you want to add, such as Add Catalog.

Expand a list of values

Lists of values are available in forms when you must select one (single select) or more (multi select) items, for example IP addresses or VMs.

Tip

A multi-select list displays a check box in the upper left corner of the table next to the first column label. Click this check box to select all items in the table.

The item label appears to the right of the Expand icon. Click the Expand icon to display the list, then select an item or items.

Once an item is selected, its value appears in parentheses to the right of the Expand icon and label.

Collapse a list of values

Once a list of values is expanded, the Expand icon changes to a Collapse icon. Click the Collapse icon to hide the list of values, for example to see what is beneath the list.