Cisco's award winning converged infrastructure management software solution just got even better! In the latest release of Cisco UCS Director, we've added broader and deeper infrastructure support across the compute, network, storage and virtualization layers, as well making the product even more scalable.  The latest release also comes with new software development kits (SDKs) for partners to provide extensibility and interoperability and a northbound API for integration with Cisco's Intelligent Automation for Cloud (IAC) as well as other cloud management systems.  Let's take a closer look at these enhancements in detail.

SDKs and APIs

UCS Director's new SDKs and APIs were recently made available to give our partners the following functionality:

• Northbound API which integrates into higher platforms like Cisco IAC.  This API enables you to perform operations on Cisco UCS Director resources and to integrate those operations into applications so that they can provide API-supported functionality and features.
• SDK  available on cisco.com & DevNet (CDN), which provides open automation for partners looking to create new device connector

Compute

The new software release added all the new functionality of UCS Manager 2.1 (Delmar MR1) including KVM console access to both Cisco B-series and C-series servers.  It provided the introduction of LAN and SAN connectivity policies including VLAN grouping.  With Fabric Interconnect you can now directly connect devices and do zoning for enhanced security.

UCS Director manages legacy servers from Dell and HP to improve manageability across customer data centers, while facilitating migration to UCS.  The same holds true for certain network products including Brocade.  While we can't magically imbue these third party products with fully programmable capabilities, UCS Director provides a single view and automation using the basic vendor-provided APIs.

Network

For the Cisco Nexus 3000, 5000 and 7000 Series, the latest software release add support for the following NX-OS software features: VDC, VFC, VPC, MST, PVST, and VTP. In addition, you can configure static MAC addresses, assign a MAC address to an interface, unassign a MAC address from an interface, configure age time, and create a MAC address tabular report.

It added support for the Cisco MDS 9000 Series, NX-OS software features: VFC and enhanced SAN zoning.  As well as support for FlexPod with Clustered Data OnTap 8.2.

Storage

VMAX -Support is available for the EMC VMAX storage array that includes the 10K, 20K, and 40K EMC VMAX models. The supported feature set available through Cisco UCS Director includes creating and managing initiator groups, storage groups, masking views and other functionality required for provisioning and managing block-based storage operations from EMC VMAX storage arrays. Integration with EMC VMAX also enables Cisco UCS Director to support the management and orchestration of VCE Vblock 720 configurations.

VNX -Support is available for the EMC VNX series that includes the 5100, 5300, 5500, 5700 and 7500 models. The supported feature set includes storage asset inventory, discovery, reporting, orchestration, and provisioning for file, block, and unified storage.

NetApp -Support is available for OnTap 8.2 and Clustered OnTap. This support includes the following features:

Create Datastore using VSC with select vserver name and vfiler name inputs

• Create ClusterFlexibleVolume with new, mandatory input of flexcache origin volume name for type DC
• Delete Export policy and rule
• Binding error improvements for associate LUN as datastore.

Virtualization

Beyond managing and deploying leading hypervisors onto bare-metal infrastructure, UCS Director also creates virtual machines on demand and loads operating systems within the VM or directly on bare-metal.  The latest release of UCS Director features the following enhancements:

VMware vSphere Enhancements

Data Store Monitoring Report Enhancements-Support includes the following features:

• Disk latency
• I/O throughput and IOPs
• Total, used, and overprovisioned capacity
• Overcommitment ratio
• VMs
• vmdk disk latency report

Microsoft Hyper-V Enhancements

Software Features-Support includes the following features:

• Orchestration capabilities extended to attached external storage in SCVMM (SMB/LUN<SMI-S proxy>) including allocation and configuration for SCVMM 2012SP1 and SCVMM 2012R2 base clusters/hosts
• Orchestration capabilities extended to VLAN base networking model with respect to SCVMM2012 SP1 and SCVMM 2012 R2
• Host management tasks
• VMM version support extended to SCVMM 2012 R2 in Inventory/Report/Provision/Configuration
• VM access-Web & RDP
• REST API Support

 Quick Overview -Converged Infrastructure Management

From a physical device, cloud, and hypervisor perspective, the following vendors are supported by Cisco's UCS Director:

• Virtualization: VMware, Hyper-V, XenDesktop, Red Hat KVM
• Compute: UCS (UCSM and CIMC), HP iLO2, iLO3, iLO4, IPMI, Invicta (Formerly Whiptail)
• Network: Cisco (NX-OS, IOS, ASA), Force10, Brocade
• Storage: EMC VNX, EMC VMAX, NetApp

 Scalability

Cisco's UCS Director latest release has increased the number of supported network devices (up to 50,000 virtual machines and 5,000 devices), and introduces a more flexible distributed, scale as you grow architecture.  The distributed architecture of a multi-node setup enables you to scale Cisco UCS Director to support a larger number of virtual machines (VMs) than is supported by a single installation of Cisco UCS Director.

This setup includes the following nodes:

• One primary node that acts as the master controller.
• One or more service nodes that act as stateless execution engines.
• One monitoring database that contains data for users, groups, VMs, virtual data centers, and configuration.
• One inventory database that contains monitoring and inventory data.

The multi-node setup improves scalability by offloading the processing of system tasks, such as inventory data collection, from the primary node to one or more service nodes. You can assign certain system tasks to one or more service nodes. The number of nodes determines how the processing of system tasks is scaled.  You can enable and disable system tasks or assign service node pools to system tasks for load balancing.

With over 30,000 UCS customers, including thousands of FlexPod, Vblock and VSPEX customers, these new scalability and device support numbers opens up a massive opportunity with an install base that has deep integration functionality with UCS Director.

What does this mean to UCS Director Customers?

The vast majority of IT administrative budget being used for maintenance like mundane manual administrative tasks which are typically manual, tedious, and error prone.  UCS Director breaks this cycle by giving users the ability to automate end-to-end IT processes, by abstracting the complexity of individual devices, hypervisors, and virtual machines into a graphically viewable and easily manageable context. It allows resource delivery across the virtualization, computing, network, and storage layers, using a single web-based view.

Cisco UCS Director is an exciting solution that allows CIOs and IT managers to work together to achieve IT efficiency and business agility. Delivering simplicity and teamwork to the data center, Cisco UCS Director can be installed and operational within hours.

Cisco's award winning UCS Director will enable your organization to automate your data center infrastructure to allow you to kick-off new projects in minutes instead of weeks.  Download the latest version of Cisco UCS Director and try it free for 30 days!

More about UCS Director

Learn more about Cisco UCS Director at http://www.cisco.com/go/ucsdirector

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