Figure 9-9 Cisco Unified Computing System
Connectivity
All Cisco UCS servers support Cisco SingleConnect
technology. Cisco SingleConnect is a revolutionary
technology that supports all traffic from the servers
(LAN, SAN, management, and so on) over a single
physical link. The savings that this technology brings
only as part of the cabling simplification is orders of
magnitude higher than competing products.
Cisco UCS Manager provides an HTML 5 graphical user
interface (GUI), a command-line interface (CLI), and a
comprehensive API. All Cisco UCS fabric functions and
managed objects are available over the UCS API.
Developers can take advantage of the extensive API and
can enhance the UCS platform according to their unique
requirements. Tools and software integrations with
solutions from third-party vendors like VMware,
Microsoft, and Splunk are already publicly available. We
will briefly see later in this chapter how the Cisco UCS
PowerTool for UCS Manager and the Python software
development kit (SDK) can be used to automate and
programmatically manage Cisco UCS Manager.
With Cisco UCS Manager, the data center servers can be
managed using an infrastructure-as-code framework.
This is possible through another innovation that is
included with the Cisco UCS solution: the service profile.
The service profile is a logical construct in UCS Manager
that contains the complete configuration of a physical