Cisco on The IT Hollow

Cisco UCS Director Catalog Request

Mon, 23 Jan 2017 15:00:24 +0000

Cisco UCS Director Catalog Requests are the entire reason for having a cloud management platform in the first place. It’s the end user’s store for where they can request machines and services. To request a service, login to the UCS Director Portal with an account that has the “Service End-User” role. This role provides a different portal when logging in that only shows the user’s orders and catalogs and removes all of the administration options.

Creating a Cisco UCS Director Catalog

Mon, 14 Nov 2016 15:05:26 +0000

Creating a Cisco UCS Director Catalog is a critical step because it’s what your end users will request new virtual machines and services from. There are a couple types of catalogs that will deploy virtual machines, advanced and standard. Standard selects a virtual machine template from vSphere. Advanced selects a pre-defined workflow that has been built in UCSD and then published to the catalog.

Create a Standard Catalog

To create a “standard” object go to the Policies drop down and select catalogs. From there click “Add”. Select a catalog type and then click “Submit”. In this example, I’ve chosen the “Standard” catalog type.

Terraform with Cisco UCS Director

Mon, 07 Nov 2016 15:15:58 +0000

I’m a big fan of Terraform from Hashicorp but many organizations are using cloud management platforms like Cisco UCS Director or vRealize Automation in order to deploy infrastructure. If you read my blog often, you’ll know that I’ve got some experience with both of these products and if you’re looking to get up to speed on either of them, check out one of these links: UCS Director 6 Guide or vRealize Automation 7 Guide. But why not use Terraform with Cisco UCS Director and have the best of both worlds?

Assigning Permissions to UCS Director Catalogs

Wed, 02 Nov 2016 14:06:17 +0000

Creating a Cisco UCS Director Catalog is the first step to publishing services to your end users. The second step is to assign permissions. This post will show you how to assign permissions to UCS Director Catalogs.

To allow users to access a catalog item they must be granted permissions. To do this, go to the Administration drop down –> Users and Groups. From there click on the “User Groups” tab and find the group which should be entitled.

Cisco UCS Director End User Self-Service Policy

Mon, 31 Oct 2016 14:02:18 +0000

The Cisco UCS Director end user self-service policy is used to determine which day 2 operations that come out of the box are available on catalogs in a VDC. By “day 2” I mean the types of operations that can be performed on a virtual machine after its been deployed, such as reboot, power on, snapshot, etc.

To configure these, go to the Policies drop down and select Virtual/Hypervisor Policies –> Service Delivery. Then select the “End User Self-Service Policy” and click the Add button.

UCS Director VMware Management Policy

Wed, 26 Oct 2016 15:24:20 +0000

Cisco UCS Director VMware Management Policy is used to determine how virtual machines will behave and more specifically be cleaned up. In the cloud world, the removal of inactive and unnecessary virtual machines may be more important that the deployment of them. The VM Management Policy is used to configure leases, notifications about when leases expire, and determining when a VM is inactive. This policy is very useful to keep your cloud clean, and removing unneeded virtual machines when they’re past their usefulness.

UCS Director Cost Model

Mon, 24 Oct 2016 14:08:29 +0000

Chargeback or at least showback is an important thing for any cloud environment. Cisco UCS Director can provide cost information back to managers but you need to create a UCS Director cost model. This cost model will define how all the costs are calculated.

Add a Cost Model

To create a cost model, go to the Policies drop down and select Virtual/Hypervisor Policies –> Service Delivery. Then select the Cost Model tab.

UCS Director System Policies

Wed, 19 Oct 2016 14:15:23 +0000

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.

UCS Director Network Policies

Mon, 17 Oct 2016 14:30:55 +0000

The UCS Director Virtual Data Center construct requires several underlying policies in order to become an item that virtual machine can be deployed on. One of these items is the networking policy which includes IP Pools, VLANs, vNic rules and port group selection.

IP Pool Policy

Before creating any Network Policies it may be necessary to create an IP Pool Policy. The IP Pool is used to distribute IP Addresses from UCS Director instead of an IPAM solution or DHCP. If either of those methods are to be used, this section can be skipped.

UCS Director VMware Storage Policy

Mon, 17 Oct 2016 14:08:10 +0000

The storage policy defines how virtual disks will be deployed on vSphere datastores. This policy will be added to the Cisco UCS Director Virtual Data Center construct to provide a comprehensive policy on how to deploy new virtual machines on VMware vSphere.

VMware Storage Policies

To configure a VMware Storage Policy, go to the Policies drop down “Virtual/Hypervisor Policies” –> Storage. Then click on the “VMware Storage Policy” tab.

You’ll notice that there may be some default storage policies listed here. These can be deleted and you can create your own policies from scratch. VMware storage polices are created by default when you add the cloud. Click “Add”.

Cisco UCS Director 6 Guide

Thu, 13 Oct 2016 14:00:44 +0000

Cisco UCS Director 6 is a cloud management platform that can deploy virtual machines and services across vSphere, KVM, Hyper-V and AWS endpoints. UCS Director will manage the orchestration, lifecycle and governance of virtual machines deployed through it and can also help in the automatic provisioning of hardware resources. Cisco has plenty of documentation on how to click the buttons to create constructs used for deployment, but I was not able to find any great resources on what order they should be performed in and why I’m making the choices in the GUI. If you follow this guide in the order of posts listed, it should help you to get a Cisco UCS Director 6 environment setup and be able to use it to deploy virtual resources. This guide does not cover many of the additional benefits that UCSD can provide when dealing with a physical environment. I hope that this guide can give you a good starting point on how the solution works and what you can do with it.

UCS Director Computing Policy

Thu, 13 Oct 2016 13:55:53 +0000

The Computing Polices determine how vCPUs and vMEM will be assigned to a virtual machine deployed through UCS Director as well as which clusters and hosts can have virtual machines placed on them.

Add a VMware Computing Policy

To add a computing policy got to the Policies drop down and select “Virtual/Hypervisor Polices” –> Computing. Then select the VMware Computing Policy tab.

You’ll notice that there may be some default VMware computing policies listed here. These can be deleted and you can create your own policies from scratch. VMware computing polices are created by default when you add the cloud.

UCS Director Infrastructure Setup

Wed, 12 Oct 2016 14:00:05 +0000

UCS Director is a cloud management platform and thus requires some infrastructure to deploy the orchestrated workloads. In many cases UCS Director can also orchestrate the configuration and deployment of bare metal or hardware as well, such as configuring new VLANs on switches, deploying operating systems on blades and setting hardware profiles etc. This post focuses on getting those devices to show up in UCS Director so that additional automation can be performed.

UCS Director Basic Setup Configurations

Tue, 11 Oct 2016 14:05:15 +0000

The basic deployment of UCS Director consists of deploying an OVF file that is available from the Cisco downloads site. This post won’t go through the deployment of the OVF but this should be a pretty simple setup. The deployment will ask for IP Addressing information and some passwords. Complete the deployment of the OVF in your virtual environment and then continue with this post.

Once the OVF has been deployed, open a web browser and place the IP Address of the appliance in the address bar.

Cisco UCS Director VDCs

Mon, 10 Oct 2016 14:16:44 +0000

Cisco UCS Director utilizes the idea of a Virtual Data Center (VDC) to determine how and where virtual machine should be placed. This includes which clusters to deploy to, networks to use, datastores to live on, as well as the guest customization and cost models that will be used for those virtual machines. According to the UCS Director Administration Guide, a Virtual Data Center is “a logical grouping that combines virtual resources, operational details, rules, and policies to manage specific group requirements”. Cisco UCS Director VDCs are the focal point of a virtual machine deployment.

UCS Director Dynamic List of Values

Mon, 10 Aug 2015 13:55:47 +0000

When you execute a Cisco UCS Director workflow you’re usually prompted to enter in some information. Usually this is something like a virtual machine name, or an IP Address, even some credentials possibly. The values that you enter can be formatted so that they come from a list and the user just has to select the right value. This helps immensely in the amount of troubleshooting you have to do because only specific verified values can be displayed.

Create a Custom Button in UCS Director

Mon, 27 Jul 2015 13:59:02 +0000

Cisco UCS Director gives us some great automation and orchestration capabilities in the product. One thing I’ve noticed though is the need to customize the actions that can performed on virtual machines after deployment (Sometimes called Day 2 Operations). This post explains how to make some custom buttons for end users to manage their workloads more effectively.

Create Workflow

Creating a workflow is out of the scope of this post, but we need to have a workflow to use for our examples. I’ve created a very simple workflow to create a VM Snapshot and email the user when it happens. To create your own workflow Go to Policies –> Orchestration –> Workflows to get started.