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.
- Extract the download ZIP, the download ZIP is around 2.5GB and the OVF/VMDK must be extracted before you can deploy it.
- Once extracted you should have 2 files; cucsd_4_1_0_0.ovf and system.vmdk
- From the vSphere Client go to the file menu and select Deploy OVF Template…
- Browse out to where the cucsd_4_1_0_0.ovf file is located and select it
- OVF Template Details
- Provide a VM name and inventory location
- Select a VM data store
- Disk Format
- 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.
- Ignore the DCHP warning here, during the first boot of the VM appliance you are prompted for a static IP.
- 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.
- 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
- This is what you see on first login
- Change the default admin password and create a new user for yourself. To do this go to Administration, Users and Groups
- 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.
Jeremy Waldrop's Blog 
Hello Jeremy, it would be great if you could post an article on how NMS solutions like DCNM (which you had covered earlier) or any generic NMS managing data center storage, compute and network entities measure up with UCS director. Do NMS solutions like DCNM have any function overlap with UCS director ? What features are they missing which data center architects/CCIEs/admins would find really helpful for their day to day work ?
Hi,
I am very eagerly awaiting for Part 3 & 4 etc,and its my interest to know about new technologies in Cisco UCS meand DC side.
So please post the remain parts asap.
Regards,
Kandan K
Pingback: UCS Director – BareMetal Agent Installation Version 5.2, Upgrade to 5.3 « Virtual Notions
Pingback: UCS Director - BareMetal Agent Installation Version 5.2, Upgrade to 5.3 | vNotions