Introduction to Cisco UCS Director

Today I am going to talk about one of the important piece of Cisco UCS orchestration layer tool and the name is Cisco UCS Director. Now the question is what is the reason why Cisco come up with the Cisco UCS director and where we can use this tool.

Cisco UCS Director is an extremely powerful, centralized management and orchestration tool that can make the day-to-day operations of a small commercial IT staff palatable. 

By using the automation UCS Director affords, a small IT staff can speed up delivery of new services and applications. Cisco UCS Director abstracts hardware and software into programmable tasks, and takes full advantage of a workflow designer to allow an administrator to simply drag and drop tasks into a workflow to deliver the necessary resources 

Fig 1.1- UCS Director Architecture

Cisco UCS Director automates end-to-end IT processes, abstracting the complexity of individual devices, hypervisors, and virtual machines into a graphically viewable and easily manageable context 

Cisco UCS Director provides role-based access control, which can be matched to your company’s organizational structure, for different types of IT users. 

Administrators or other authorized users may define the policies and entitlements for the data center as a whole or for specific domains and resources across computing, network, and storage. Application owners outside the core IT organization may also be granted access to the self-service console to request and use infrastructure according to the policies and entitlements defined by your IT organization. 

Cisco UCS Director operates across multiple infrastructure stacks in a single data center and across multiple data centers globally. IT policies define the resource groupings for specific user entitlements to access and manage infrastructure resources, allowing a common set of best practices across a global organization. 

Fig 1.2- UCS Director Console

Cisco UCS Director expands the scope of these capabilities beyond the core Cisco UCS elements, so they can include all the resources necessary to host applications, including Microsoft, Oracle, SAP, big data, LAMP stacks, and custom workloads. 

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.