Cisco Live Amsterdam concluded with significant announcements from Cisco, focusing on AI, Application Modernization, and Security. Whether you joined us in person or virtually, I hope you found the event insightful. As part of the Cisco Live program, I had the pleasure of unveiling new integrated solutions developed in collaboration with Red Hat, leveraging their OpenShift Virtualization and Ansible Automation Platform.

The partnership between Cisco and Red Hat has been longstanding. Last year we announced our companies are helping customers adapt to infrastructure modernization requirements by building integrated solutions that include Cisco UCS, Cisco Intersight, Cisco data center networking, and Red Hat OpenShift. These solutions unite best-in-class technologies from Cisco and our partners.

We are enhancing the success of Cisco's integrated solutions with Red Hat OpenShift by introducing a world-class infrastructure automation and management platform. The Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform is now available from Cisco, operating on leading technologies like Cisco UCS and Cisco Intersight. Our aim is to provide a robust, scalable, and automated foundation for customers who seek AI tools and solutions to modernize their application infrastructure and data center networking, all while ensuring a simple and seamless procurement process.

Cisco's compute and AI products have always benefited from deep integrations with the Ansible Automation Platform through Certified Content Collections. This extended partnership expands on current offerings by introducing new Ansible Validated Content collections aligned with Cisco Validated Designs (CVDs). These enhancements enable the full automation of Day 0, Day 1, and Day 2 operations using Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform, delivering a straightforward and secure experience for customers.

New CVDs create an architecture for automation across the Cisco portfolio

(note: If you are not familiar with Ansible or the Ansible Automation Platform, you can learn more from Cisco partner -Red Hat.)

Here is a summary of the new CVDs and Ansible automation content we announced and showcased last week during Cisco Live Amsterdam as a result of this extended partnership:

New CVDs for FlexPod Datacenter with Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization and Ansible Automation Platform

The FlexPod with Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform and FlexPod with OpenShift Virtualization Cisco Validated Designs (CVDs) provide a robust foundation for deploying OpenShift on FlexPod bare-metal infrastructure.

While initial deployment is critical, Day 2 operations-including system maintenance, scaling, security enforcement, and performance optimization-are essential for ensuring long-term efficiency and stability, for example:

• Ensure continuous compliance with automated UCS configuration enforcement
• Improve security posture through automated patching and vulnerability remediation
• Scale resources dynamically with automated UCS server provisioning
• Enhance system reliability with proactive monitoring and self-healing infrastructure

By leveraging automation and Ansible Automation Platform, organizations can simplify Day 2 operations across OpenShift Virtualization, NetApp storage, and Cisco UCS infrastructure, reducing manual efforts while improving consistency, security, and scalability.

Value of extending Ansible Automation Platform support on Cisco UCS bare metal

Cisco customers can now streamline operations by eliminating the hypervisor layer to run cloud-native workloads. This reduces overall infrastructure costs while enhancing resource utilization.

With OpenShift Virtualization, legacy applications can operate in virtual machines (VMs) that can be created, managed, cloned, and live-migrated alongside containerized workloads on bare-metal Cisco UCS. This bare-metal architecture provides direct hardware access, optimizing performance for high-demand workloads like high-performance computing, AI, and other latency-sensitive applications.

Ansible Validated Content for Day-2 Operations

Ansible validated content consists of Ansible roles that offer expert guidance on performing specific operations and tasks, enabling immediate automation.

Red Hat and Cisco are offering an initial set of Ansible Validated content, supporting the CVD for FlexPod Datacenter with OpenShift Virtualization and Ansible Automation Platform, targeting the following customer use cases:

•  Verifying active and inactive ports
• Modifying the profile of a new chassis
• Deploying a new server to a chassis with the correct profile settings
• Upgrading server and fabric interconnect firmware
• Adding or changing IP addresses and VLANs on new or existing servers

Looking Forward to What is Next

The new CVD announced at Cisco Live Amsterdam builds upon the success of Cisco integrated virtualization solutions with Cisco partners Red Hat and Netapp. With the addition of validated automation content and an automation management platform to run this automation, we believe this "next-level" CVD will help customers simplify operations and reduce risk.

The use cases targeted by these announcements are just the starting point. Between now and Cisco Live San Diego, look for additional Ansible Validated Content targeting new use cases in support of Cisco and Red Hat extended partnership:

Configuration Management & Drift Detection

Patching & Security Updates

Resource Scaling & Performance Optimization

Monitoring & Alerting Automation

Backup & Disaster Recovery (DR) Automation

Policy Compliance & Governance

Visit the Red Hat+Cisco Solutions page 

Where to Learn More:

• Discuss with your Cisco account team or Cisco partner
• Watch the recording of this session: Enhancing Day 2 Operations with Cisco Compute and Ansible Automation
• Review the CVDs

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