Cisco UCS Director is not a replacement for the management of rack servers (Cisco UCS C-Series Rack-Mount Servers and Cisco UCS E-series servers) through Cisco Integrated Management Controller (Cisco IMC). Rather, Cisco UCS Director enables you to orchestrate and automate some of the steps required to configure and maintain a rack-mount server. In this way, Cisco UCS Director provides a statistical analysis of data and a converged view of each pod.

You must add these rack servers as a Rack account to Cisco UCS Director, after which Cisco UCS Director provides you with complete visibility into the rack server configuration. In addition, you can use Cisco UCS Director to manage and configure the rack-mount server.

Important

Support for rack server management through the legacy Cisco Rack Server (CIMC) accounts is not available from release version 5.4 onwards. After you upgrade to Cisco UCS Director Release 5.4, the connection status of account type Cisco Rack Server (CIMC) from the Physical Accounts tab is displayed as Failed. You must create new accounts from the Rack Accounts tab for the CIMC servers, and manually delete the accounts displayed from the Physical Accounts tab. You can only manage rack servers that are running Cisco Integrated Management Controller (Cisco IMC) version 1.5 and higher on C-series servers, and version 2.3.1 and higher on E-series servers. For information on how to add and manage rack servers in Cisco UCS Director, see Adding a Rack Group and Discovering and Importing Rack Servers.

You can use Cisco UCS Director to perform Cisco IMC management, monitoring, and reporting tasks for physical and virtual devices on a rack-mount server.

You cannot use Cisco UCS Director to perform certain Cisco IMC system management tasks on a rack-mount server, such as the following:

• Virtual machine management

Some server management tasks that you cannot perform in Cisco UCS Director can be automated through orchestration workflows, such as associating a VIC policy, RAID policy or a boot policy.