Cisco UCS B-series blade servers, C-series rack servers,
S-series storage servers, UCS Mini, and Cisco HyperFlex
hyperconverged servers can all be managed through one
interface: UCS Manager. UCS Manager provides unified,
embedded management of all software and hardware
components of Cisco UCS. Cisco UCS Manager software
runs on a pair of hardware appliances called fabric
interconnects. The two fabric interconnects form an
active/standby cluster that provides high availability.
The UCS infrastructure that is being managed by UCS
Manager forms a UCS fabric that can include up to 160
servers. The system can scale to thousands of servers by
integrating individual UCS Manager instances with Cisco
UCS Central in a multidomain Cisco UCS environment.
UCS Manager participates in the complete server
lifecycle, including server provisioning, device discovery,
inventory, configuration, diagnostics, monitoring, fault
detection, and auditing and statistics collection. All
infrastructure that is being managed by UCS Manager is
either directly connected to the fabric interconnects or
connected through fabric extenders. Fabric extenders, as
the name implies, have the function of offering
additional scalability in connecting servers back to the
fabric interconnects. They are zero-management, low-
cost, and low-power devices that eliminate the need for
expensive top-of-rack Ethernet and Fibre Channel
switches. Figure 9-9 shows how all these components
connect to each other.