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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 Cisco UCS Director Shell is a text-based menu that you access through a secure shell (SSH) application and Cisco UCS Director administrator credentials. With the Shell, you can execute commands to perform various system administration tasks, including:
This guide describes all of the commands available to you when logging in to the Cisco UCS Director shell. You can use these commands to perform the following administrative tasks:
Stopping/starting all Cisco services
Display Service Status
Stopping/starting the MySQL database
Backing up/restoring the appliance database
Changing ShellAdmin password
Synching up time
Configuring network interface
Enabling the database for a BMA Appliance
Adding a BMA hostname/IP address to the appliance
Displaying network details
Pinging hostname/IP address
Version (Cisco UCS Director appliance version)
Importing CA (JKS) file
Importing CA Cert (PEM) file for Virtual Network Computing (VNC)
Shutdown of the Appliance
Rebooting the Appliance
Manage Root Access
Troubleshooting by using Tail Inframgr logs
Applying a patch to the appliance
Login as Root
Configuring Multi-node Setup
Clean Up Patch Files
Migrating from Single to Multi-Node
Enabling HTTP access
Configuring the defaulty UI
Resetting MySql user password
Applying signed patch to the appliance
Terminating active GUI session(s)
Quitting the shell
For additional system administration information, refer to the Cisco UCS Director Administration Guide.
To successfully execute the commands described in this guide, you must meet the following prerequisites:
![]() Note | The information in this guide is based on Cisco UCS Director, release 4.0, and later releases. |
The login procedure requires the use of a Secure Shell (SSH) client and the proper login credentials. After gaining access to Cisco UCS Director, you can perform a wide variety of system administration tasks.
Obtain proper access to Cisco UCS Director and a secure shell (SSH) application.