Sep 29, 2014

Cisco UCS is a management interface to manage end-to-end resources in a unified computing platform. This management system can be accessed via many ways. The two main ways are as below:

1. Cisco UCS Manager GUI – Cisco UCS Manager GUI is a graphical interface that you can use to manage the whole UCS platform. This will list and show you all the equipment within your UCS platform and you can configure the equipment as well as monitor them.
2. Cisco UCS CLI – Cisco UCS CLI is the command base tool to manager the equipment as well as configure the equipment with in the Cisco UCS platform.

Cisco UCS provides the below features to the administrators:

• Centralised management – This creates a single management point for all the resources and devices. Examples for those resources and devices include Virtual Servers, Software define switches, power management for servers and server chassis, Firmware and BIOS settings, and updates for the servers in the chassis.
• Role Base Administration – This lets the administrators create roles within the Cisco UCS system and assign those roles to the users. For an example, a server administrator role can be created by assigning server level permissions and tasks related to the server configuration.

With the above features you will be able to perform the below tasks in the Cisco UCS Manger:

• Hardware Management – We can use the Cisco UCS manager to manage the hardware such as chassis, servers, fabric interconnects interface cards, fans, I/O modules.
• Server Administration – We can perform many server administration tasks with the UCS Interface such as server pool configuration, server pool policy creation, create service profiles and apply service profiles to servers or server pools.
• Storage Administration – Storage for the servers can be managed via Cisco UCS itself. We can create VSANs, configure ports for SANs, and configure port channels as well.
• Network Administration – We can use Cisco UCS Manager to create the VLANs we need for cloud platform, configure virtual switches and up link ports that we need to configure virtual networking in the cloud platform.

By using all these features and tasks we can manage our entire cloud platform from one interface and then use this platform to implement the virtual servers and deploy clouds by using Microsoft Hyper-V or VMware infrastructure.