components. From a data center management
perspective, the following are some of the tasks that can
be performed using Cisco UCS Director:
Create, clone, and deploy service profiles and templates for all Cisco
UCS servers and compute applications.
Manage, monitor, and report on data center components such as Cisco
UCS domains or Cisco Nexus devices.
Monitor usage, trends, and capacity across a converged infrastructure
on a continuous basis.
Deploy and add capacity to converged infrastructures in a consistent,
repeatable manner.Cisco UCS Director also enables the creation of
workflows that provide automation services. These
automation workflows can be published and made
available to the end users of the data center resources
through on-demand portals. Once built and validated,
these workflows perform the same way every time, no
matter who triggers them. A data center administrator
can run them, or role-based access control can be
implemented to enable users and customers to run these
workflows on a self-service basis. From an infrastructure
automation perspective, some of the use cases that Cisco
UCS Director can help automate include the following:
Virtual machine provisioning and lifecycle management.
Compute, network, and storage resources configuration and lifecycle
management.
Bare-metal server provisioning, including operating system
installation.Cisco UCS Director supports Cisco ACI by offering
automation workflows that orchestrate the APIC
configuration and management tasks. It also supports
multitenancy and the ability to define contracts between
different container tiers.
Cisco UCS Director can be managed using Cisco
Intersight, which is covered later in this chapter. Cisco
UCS Director is a 64-bit appliance that uses the standard
templates Open Virtualization Format (OVF) for