Cisco UCS Director: Part 2

In Part 1 I went over the features and capabilities of Cisco UCS Director. In part 2 I am going to cover the deployment of the UCS Director Virtual Appliance into a VMware vSphere environment.

The Cisco official installation guide can be found here – http://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/td/docs/unified_computing/ucs/ucs-director/vsphere-install-guide/4-1/b_Installing_UCSDirector_on_vSphere_41.html

Being that UCS Director is distributed via a Virtual Appliance the deployment and initial IP address configuration is very straightforward.

Obliviously before the appliance can be deployed the OVF ZIP must be downloaded from Cisco.

1. Extract the download ZIP, the download ZIP is around 2.5GB and the OVF/VMDK must be extracted before you can deploy it.
   
2. Once extracted you should have 2 files; cucsd_4_1_0_0.ovf and system.vmdk
   
3. From the vSphere Client go to the file menu and select Deploy OVF Template…
4. Browse out to where the cucsd_4_1_0_0.ovf file is located and select it
   
5. OVF Template Details
   
6. Provide a VM name and inventory location
   
7. Select a VM data store
   
8. Disk Format
   
9. Select the VM network you want the UCS Director in. It isn’t very intuitive but there is a drop-down box in the Destination Networks column. Ignore the warning at the bottom.
   
10. Ignore the DCHP warning here, during the first boot of the VM appliance you are prompted for a static IP.
    
11. After the VM appliance has finished deploying open the VM console and power it on. During boot you will be prompted to set an IP address.
    
12. Once the UCS Director VM appliance is up verify you can ping it and then open a Web Browser to the IP address. The default login is admin, admin
    
13. This is what you see on first login
    
14. Change the default admin password and create a new user for yourself. To do this go to Administration, Users and Groups
    
15. If you have a license upload and apply it under Administration, Licensing
    

In Part 3 we will get add our infrastructure components and get into the real meat of UCS Director.

Cisco UCS Director: Part 1

Now that I have finally finished up with the CCIE DC I have time to spend on some of the new technology that I have pushed to the side in the last 6 months.

I first heard of UCS Director (Cloupia at the time) about 2 years ago before Cisco acquired them. I was immediately excited about the possibilities this software brings to the table. While I enjoy manually building out new UCS Service Profiles, zoning, provisioning SAN storage and loading ESXi there is something to be said for automating all of those mundane processes.

UCS Director is like having an easy button in UCSM that provisions new compute, storage and networking resources with the click of a button.

Aside from to provisioning automation UCS Director also has extensive management, monitoring and self-service provisioning of physical and virtual servers. Here is are a couple of tables copied from the install guide features list

Over the next month or so I will be getting UCS Director up on our lab to kick the tires on it. I really think there is a lot of value in this product for a lot of current UCS customers.