Chapter 9
Cisco Data Center and Compute
Management Platforms and APIsThis chapter covers the following topics:
Cisco ACI: This section describes Cisco ACI and the APIs it exposes.
Cisco UCS Manager: This section covers Cisco UCS Manager and the
public APIs that come with it.
Cisco UCS Director: This section goes over Cisco UCS Director and
its APIs.
Cisco Intersight: This section introduces Cisco Intersight and its
REST API interface.This chapter begins exploring Cisco data center
technologies and the SDKs and APIs that are available
with them. First, it provides an introduction to Cisco
Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI) and its
components. This chapter also looks at the Cisco ACI
REST API and the resources exposed over the API, as
well as how to use a popular Python library called
acitoolkit to extract data from the API. This chapter
examines next Cisco Unified Computing System (UCS)
and how all its components work together to offer one of
the most comprehensive and scalable data center
compute solutions available today. This chapter also
provides an overview of Cisco UCS Manager, the XML
API it provides, and how to interact with this API by
using curl commands and the Cisco UCS Manager SDK.
Cisco UCS Director takes data center automation to the
next level, and this chapter covers the tasks and
workflows that are available with it. The chapter also
discusses the Cisco UCS Director SDK and its
components and the curl commands that are used to