Overview

This chapter contains the following sections:

Cisco UCS Central Management through Cisco UCS Director

Cisco UCS Director uses orchestration to automate some of the steps required to configure the Cisco UCS domains registered with Cisco UCS Central and to provide a statistical analysis of the data.

When you add a Cisco UCS Central account, Cisco UCS Director performs an inventory collection on the Cisco UCS Central configuration. During inventory collection, Cisco UCS Director discovers and imports the existing configuration, including the following:

  • Domain groups

  • Domain group policies

  • Registration policies

  • Each registered Cisco UCS domain and the Cisco UCS Manager inventory for that Cisco UCS domain, including the following:

    • Fabric interconnects

    • Chassis

    • Servers

After you add a Cisco UCS Central account and its inventory collection is complete, you can use Cisco UCS Director to register more Cisco UCS Manager accounts with that Cisco UCS Central account, if desired.

Cisco UCS Director provides you with complete visibility into Cisco UCS Central and the registered Cisco UCS domains. In addition, you can use Cisco UCS Director to manage and configure those Cisco UCS domains.

Cisco UCS Central Tasks You Can Perform in Cisco UCS Director

You can use Cisco UCS Director to perform management, monitoring, and reporting tasks for physical and virtual devices within Cisco UCS domains registered with Cisco UCS Central.

Configuration and Administration

You can create and configure Cisco UCS software components in Cisco UCS Director, such as:

  • Global and local service profiles

  • Global and local policies

Monitoring and Reporting

You can also use Cisco UCS Director to monitor and report on the registered Cisco UCS domains and their components, including:

  • Service profile association

  • vNICs

  • vHBAs

  • Cisco UCS hardware, including fabric interconnects, chassis, and servers

Cisco UCS Central Tasks You Cannot Perform in Cisco UCS Director

You cannot use Cisco UCS Director to perform certain system management tasks within a Cisco UCS domain registered with Cisco UCS Central, such as the following:

  • Creation of some policies

  • Firmware upgrades

  • User management

Read-Only Policies

You cannot create all policies in a Cisco UCS Central account. Cisco UCS Director provides a read-only view of those policies in the details of the organization that includes them. Create these read-only policies in a Cisco UCS Manager account that includes the organization.

The read-only policies include the following:

  • Dynamic vNIC connection policies

  • Ethernet and Fibre Channel adapter policies

  • IPMI access profiles

  • Local disk configuration policies

  • Maintenance policies

  • Network control policies

  • Power control policies

  • QoS policies

  • Scrub policies

  • Serial over LAN policies

  • Server pool policies

  • Server pool policy qualifications

  • Threshold policies

  • vNIC/vHBA placement policies

Cisco UCS Central Orchestration Tasks

Cisco UCS Director includes orchestration features that allow you to automate configuration and management of tasks performed by Cisco UCS Central in one or more workflows. The same workflow can include Cisco UCS Central, Cisco UCS Manager, network, and storage tasks.

For more information about orchestration and examples of workflows in Cisco UCS Director, see the Cisco UCS Director Orchestration Guide.

Location of Orchestration Tasks

A complete list of the Cisco UCS Central orchestration tasks is available in the Workflow Designer, in the UCS Central Tasks section of the Task Library, and in the Cisco UCS Central Tasks folder. The Task Library includes a description of the orchestration tasks, and can be accessed from the following locations in Cisco UCS Director:

  • Policies > Orchestration > Workflows

  • http://IP_address/app/cloudmgr/onlinedocs/cloupiaTaskLib.html where IP_address is the IP address of Cisco UCS Director.

Types of Orchestration Tasks

The Cisco UCS Central orchestration tasks include the following:

  • Group assignment

  • Domain groups

  • Cisco UCS Manager registration

  • VLANs

  • Global service profiles

  • Global service profile templates

  • Time zones