Multi-tenancy allows you to divide the large physical infrastructure of an Cisco UCS domain into logical entities known as organizations. As a result, you can achieve a logical isolation between organizations without providing a dedicated physical infrastructure for each organization.

You can assign unique resources to each tenant through the related organization in the multi-tenant environment. These resources can include different policies, pools, and quality of service definitions. You can also implement locales to assign or restrict user privileges and roles by organization, if you do not want all users to have access to all organizations.

If you set up a multi-tenant environment, all organizations are hierarchical. The top-level organization is always root. The policies and pools that you create in root are system-wide and are available to all organizations in the system. However, any policies and pools created in other organizations are only available to organizations that are above it in the same hierarchy. For example, if a system has organizations named Finance and HR that are not in the same hierarchy, Finance cannot use any policies in the HR organization, and HR cannot access any policies in the Finance organization. However, both Finance and HR can use policies and pools in the root organization.

If you create organizations in a multi-tenant environment, you can also set up one or more of the following for each organization or for a sub-organization in the same hierarchy:

• Resource pools

• Policies

• Service profiles

• Service profile templates

The root organization is always the top level organization.

In a multi-tenant environment, Cisco UCS uses the hierarchy of an organization to resolve the names of policies and resource pools. When Cisco UCS Manager searches for details of a policy or a resource assigned to a pool, the following occurs:

1. Cisco UCS Manager checks for policies and pools with the specified name within the organization assigned to the service profile or policy.

2. If a policy is found or an available resource is inside a pool, Cisco UCS Manager uses that policy or resource. If the pool does not have any available resources at the local level, Cisco UCS Manager moves up in the hierarchy to the parent organization and searches for a pool with the same name. Cisco UCS Manager repeats this step until the search reaches the root organization.

3. If the search reaches the root organization and has not found an available resource or policy, Cisco UCS Manager returns to the local organization and begins to search for a default policy or available resource in the default pool.

4. If an applicable default policy or available resource in a default pool is found, Cisco UCS Manager uses that policy or resource. If the pool does not have any available resources, Cisco UCS Manager moves up in the hierarchy to the parent organization and searches for a default pool. Cisco UCS Manager repeats this step until the search reaches the root organization.

5. If Cisco UCS Manager cannot find an applicable policy or available resource in the hierarchy, it returns an allocation error.