Cisco

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. ...

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 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. ...

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 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. ...

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. ...

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. ...