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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. ...

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. ...

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”. ...

Yesterday it was announced that VMware and Amazon Web Services are partnering to provide vSphere’s hypervisor and toolsets on the AWS platform. Since this time there have been plenty of articles written questioning the motives of both parties involved and whether or not one of these two companies is going to regret this partnership. I invite you to read other perspectives on this and a few of them are listed here: Cloud Opinion, Enrico Signoretti, Frank Denemman (VMware), Jeff Barr (AWS) and there will be more. ...

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. ...

One of the new features of vRealize Automation in version 7.1 is the ability to scale out or scale in your servers. This sort of scaling is a horizontal scaling of the number of servers. For instance, if you had deployed a single web server, you can scale out to two, three etc. When you scale in, you can go from four servers to three and so on. Use Cases The use cases here could really vary widely. The easiest to get started with would be some sort of a web / database deployment where the web servers have some static front end web pages and can be deployed over and over again with the same configurations. If we were to place the web servers behind a load balancer (yep, think NSX here for you vSphere junkies) then your web applications can be scaled horizontally based on when you run out of resources. ...