Overview

This chapter contains the following sections:

Cisco UCS Management through Cisco UCS Director

Cisco UCS Director is not a replacement for Cisco UCS Manager. Rather, Cisco UCS Director uses orchestration to automate some of the steps required to configure a Cisco UCS domain. In this way, Cisco UCS Director provides a statistical analysis of the data and a converged view of each pod.

After you add a Cisco UCS domain to Cisco UCS Director as a Cisco UCS Manager account, Cisco UCS Director provides you with complete visibility into the Cisco UCS domain. In addition, you can use Cisco UCS Director to manage and configure that Cisco UCS domain.


Note

The features that you can use to manage a Cisco UCS Manager account depend on the Cisco UCS Manager release. Be sure to refer to the Cisco UCS Manager Release Notes for supported features prior to managing the account from Cisco UCS Director.

Cisco UCS Management 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 a Cisco UCS domain.

Configuration and Administration

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

  • Fabric interconnects, including ports

  • Chassis, blade servers, and rack-mount servers, including autodiscovery

  • I/O modules and fabric extenders (FEXes)

  • Network connections

  • Storage connections

  • Pools

  • Policies

  • Service profiles

Monitoring and Reporting

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

  • Power consumption

  • Temperature

  • Server availability

  • Service profile association

Cisco UCS Management 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, such as the following:

  • Firmware upgrades

  • User management

  • Virtual machine management

Cisco UCS Manager Orchestration Tasks

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

For more information about orchestration in Cisco UCS Director, see the Cisco UCS Director Orchestration Guide.

Location of Orchestration Tasks

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

  • 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 Manager orchestration tasks include tasks to configure and manage the following:

  • Servers

  • Server boot

  • Pools

  • Policies

  • VLANs

  • VSANs

  • vNICs

  • Service profiles

  • Service profile templates

  • Organizations