Cisco UCS Manager in action

So – when I was on the west coast two weeks ago, I spent time on the Cisco campus, with the former Nuova Systems crew (you’ve GOT to love startup office space :-) , and did a whole bunch of joint customer meetings.   Our common Private Cloud vision is really what our customers are telling us they want – I heard it loud and clear.   And VMware is the key glue – not as a hypervisor – but as the datacenter/cloud OS – but I digress...   I did a post of a walkthrough of the lab here.

Now – as part of that trip, I got a chance to drive the UCS manager and I thought it was a cool “untold” story.    There’s a lot of customer confusion about what exactly is the UCS manager – is it an uber management tool?   Is it a service desk management tool?   Does it do management operations that VMware or storage management tools do?  

The answer is that it’s an element manager.   It manages the UCS system, which entails the blades, the chassis, and the network (both LAN and SAN) – configuration, environmentals, etc.

So – what the big deal?   It’s a very good element manager.  Here’s what I thought - Really good management at scale.

• The chassis isn’t the point of management – the whole UCS configuration is – in big configurations, this matters a lot.   
• Simple, integrated management of all Blade, LAN and SAN actions – they are really simple, and really integrated.
• The key at scale are templates, and wherever possible statelessness of hardware.   In UCS Cisco calls these service profiles.   in vSphere, VMware calls these Host Profiles.   In the V-Max design, we call these storage templates – and are applied using auto-provisioning groups.   (and CLARiiON and Celerra customers – same idea is coming to you).    The core idea is that you can make provisioning very simple, and very decoupled from the actual physical infrastructure itself.   Using common templates also means better control (as anyone who has managed a datacenter at scale knows).   

Look – templates don’t alleviate the need for tools and processes that enforce change control, and audit and remediatation of config divergence – but good templates are a key part of maintaining control, and making provisioning easier at large scale.

BTW I can’t stop myself – while EMC is known predominantly for Storage, we’ve built a very strong “internal-cloud-centric” management portfolio.   For example, re: change control and compliance - EMC IT Compliance Manager = audit of almost anything, and EMC Server Config Manager extends the idea of VMware Host Profiles to VMs themselves and older ESX configs (not just vSphere ESX hosts) and many other use cases.   Those two examples, along with everything else we do is integrated into the vCenter APIs – including SMARTS ESM – which also integrates with the UCS elements.   But – this is a topic for another day.

Ok – back on track here…

I told the Cisco crew they should do a little camtasia walkthrough and throw it up on the Internet management tools are one of those things you have to SEE.  Brian  Schwarz pinged me this weekend to tell me they’ve posted them.

I’d highly recommend checking them out – not as fun as driving yourself, but immediately conveys the value and why – particularly at large scale, this is a big unheralded deal (at least in my opinion).  Thanks Brian

Unified Computing System Manager Revealed (Part 1)

Unified Computing System Manager Revealed (Part 2)

Comments

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[Management Dissertation]

Whenever i see the post like your's i feel that there are still helpful people who share information for the help of others, it must be helpful for other's. thanx and good job.