UCS Director System Policies are kind of a catch all for any settings that need to be defined prior to a virtual machine being deployed, and that don’t fit into a neat little category like Network, Storage or Compute. This post reviews two types of system policies: VMware and AWS.

VMware System Policy

This policy is used to configure things like the Time Zones, DNS Settings, virtual machine naming conventions and guest licensing information. The policy can be found under the Policies drop down –> Virtual/Hypervisor Policies –> Service Delivery screen and from there you’ll be looking for the VMware System Policy tab.

Click “Add”. Give the policy a name and description and then begin filling in the rest of the deployment details.

VM Name Template: This is the name of the virtual machine as it will show up in vCenter.

VM Name Validation Policy: If a validation policy is created, you can select it here to ensure that when end users pick a name, that it conforms to a set convention.

End User VM Name or VM Prefix: Allow users to enter a VM Prefix to the beginning of the name.

Power On after Deploy: Should new virtual machines be powered on once deployed?

Host Name Template: This is the naming strategy for the guest hostname

Host Name Validation Policy: If you create a validation policy, this ensures that if end users pick a name, that it conforms to a set convention.

Linux Time Zone: What time zone linux machines should be set configured with

Linux VM Max Boot Wait Time: How long before a Linux VM takes to boot before considering it timed out.

DNS Domain: The DNS domain

DNS Suffix List: The DNS Suffixes separated by a comma.

DNS Server List: The DNS Servers in the environment, separated by a comma.

VM Image Type:  The type of machine deployed. This is either (Windows and Linux) or Linux. If you choose Windows and Linux, you’ll need to enter some additional information such as licensing owners, license mode, organizations, and some specific windows server requirements.

When complete click Submit and repeat this process with additional system policies.

Amazon Deployment Policy

An Amazon Deployment Policy defines how EC2 instances will be deployed in AWS. To create an Amazon Deployment Policy go to the Policies drop down and select Virtual/Hypervisor Policies –> Service Delivery. Then select the “Amazon Deployment Policy” tab.

Give the policy a name and description.

Keypair Type: Either Unique for a new key for each VM, or a single key shared by group.

Enable CloudWatch: Check if you want AWS CloudWatch monitoring to be enabled. Additional charges apply.

Security Group: This is the AWS Security Group that will be assigned to the virtual machine in AWS.

Firewall Specifications: The firewall rules created in the security group. These are in the format of: protocol, port_range_start, port_range_end, source_CIDR

32bit VM Instance Type: The image size for a 32 bit VM

64bit VM Instance Type: The image size for a 64 bit VM

User Data: Additional information passed to an AWS EC2 instance at provisioning time to be executed. Example: yum update -y

Summary

A System Policy is required for a Cisco UCS Director Virtual Data Center. These settings will help define how the virtual machine should behave and additional policy may need to be created for KVM or Hyper-V environments. Settings for system policies may differ by type, but are all to add additional customization to the virtual machines.