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 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. ...
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. ...
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. ...
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. ...
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 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”. ...
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. ...