When we speak to joint VMware and Cisco customers who have built their data centers based on our virtualized infrastructure solutions, it is very clear what it takes for them to transform towards a truly private cloud environment. It is critical for customers to be able to leverage their existing Cloud Infrastructure investments in vSphere and UCS and to be able to build on top of that in terms of integrating management and automation solutions as they look to operate their I.T organizations in a self-service type model.
VMware Cloud Management and Cloud Orchestration solutions integrate with Cisco UCS Manager to bridge this gap between virtual and physical resources providing customers with a great deal of operational efficiencies.
Let us break this down in terms of how our joint solutions integrate:
- The first level of integration is about further leveraging the notion of stateless computing that Cisco UCS provides by their service profiles abstracting all the attributes from the physical compute and integrating this with VMware Auto Deploy for a rapid & simplified provisioning solution. Auto Deploy incorporates UCS service profile attributes as part of the host profile so when you deploy ESXi, the service profile attributes are also applied appropriately and the compute nodes (blades, rack servers) obtain the required identity.
- The next level is management integrations between vCenter and UCS Manager to achieve a single pane of glass view of the underlying infrastructure – both virtual and physical. This is achieved via Cisco UCS Plug-in for vCenter. Once imported into vCenter, it provides granular visibility into the UCS domain from vCenter including correlation of ESXi with UCS servers; chassis & fabric interconnect information and insights into service profile, service profile templates and other policies. This enables IT administrators with a number of use cases for efficiently managing their infrastructure. As an example it enables deploying native ESXi servers rapidly by associating predefined service profiles created for ESXi to non-ESXi servers. This will completely configure the physical infrastructure and in conjunction with Auto Deploy, provision ESXi as well. There are number of such use cases that we discuss in the jointly published white paper on VMware Cloud Management Integrations with Cisco UCS.
In this white paper, we also discuss the UCS Manager Plug-in for vCenter Orchestrator (vCO) integrating with the UCS Manager XML APIs. This enables vCO workflows to automate and integrate in to pre-built UCS Manager Workflows such as add service profile, associate service profile to a blade, remove service profile, set service profile power state and many more. In addition to the built-in workflows, vCO provides an API explorer to leverage the UCS Manager plug-in APIs to build custom workflows. This opens up many orchestration use cases and we discuss the potential by explaining an elastic capacity workflow leveraging the VMware Elastic capacity plug-in and dynamically provisioning a UCS blade with ESXi based on CPU and Memory requirements provided.
In terms of managing & troubleshooting the cloud environment, UCS content pack for Log Insight provides single source of data from UCS domain for correlation and to perform comprehensive analytics by the virtual admins.
- Read White Paper
- Register for Joint Technical Webinar to hear about these integrations and use cases.
When – May 14, 2014
Time – 9 AM – 10 AM PDT
By Bhumik Patel, Partner Architect, Strategic Alliances, VMware
@bhumikp, [email protected]
